It's A Beautiful Day 5
It's A Beautiful Day 5
Signed Print
Damien Hirst
£5,000-£8,000Value Indicator
$10,500-$17,000 Value Indicator
$9,000-$15,000 Value Indicator
¥50,000-¥80,000 Value Indicator
€6,000-€9,500 Value Indicator
$50,000-$80,000 Value Indicator
¥940,000-¥1,510,000 Value Indicator
$6,500-$10,500 Value Indicator
AAGR (5 years) This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.
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Medium: Block print
Edition size: 55
Year: 2013
Size: H 66cm x W 49cm
Signed: Yes
Format: Signed Print
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Auction Results
| Auction Date | Auction House | Location | Hammer Price | Return to Seller | Buyer Paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 2020 | Christie's London | United Kingdom | |||
| June 2018 | Phillips London | United Kingdom | |||
| April 2017 | Phillips New York | United States | |||
| May 2015 | Bonhams New York | United States |
Meaning & Analysis
It’s A Beautiful Day 5 is a block print from Damien Hirst’s It’s A Beautiful Day series from 2013. The print shows a black and white butterfly with its wings outspread in the centre of the rectangular composition. The butterfly sits against a bright red backdrop of solid colour, producing a striking effect.
In its stark display, the butterfly in It’s A Beautiful Day 5 appears like an insect in a natural history museum cabinet. As with all the works in the It’s A Beautiful Day series, Hirst flattens the otherwise hyperrealist butterfly with the block colour backdrop and its deliberately centred position. The scientific precision with which the butterfly is rendered emphasises this notion of the insect display cabinet. Indeed, Hirst conflates the scientific with the aesthetic throughout this series. The aesthetic comes into play in the creation of a beautiful image that uses bright and complimentary colours.
Hirst uses the butterfly motif throughout his artistic oeuvre as a ‘universal trigger.’ This motif helps the artist to explore the uncertainties at the core of human experience: love, life, death, loyalty and betrayal through unconventional media. The It’s a Beautiful Day series points to this exploration in its title that evokes a sense of fleeting happiness.
Damien Hirst, born in Bristol in 1965, is often hailed the enfant terrible of the contemporary art world. His provocative works challenge conventions and his conceptual brilliance spans installations, paintings, and sculptures, often exploring themes of mortality and the human experience. As a leading figure of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement in the late '80s, Hirst's work has dominated the British art scene for decades and has become renowned for being laced with controversy, thus shaping the dialogue of modern art.
