Name: Dome
Brand: Damien Hirst
Rating: 5 (231 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of Damien Hirst’s Dome (signed) is estimated to be worth between £16,000 and £24,000. This etching print, created in 2009, is a rare artwork with an auction history of two sales since its entry to the market in November 2016. There have been no sales in the last 12 months and the hammer price has remained consistent over the past five years. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 59.

Auction Date

Auction House

Location

Hammer Price

Return to Seller

Buyer Paid

April 2017

Sotheby's Online

United Kingdom

November 2016

Rosebery's Fine Art Auctioneers

United Kingdom

Meaning & Analysis

Dome is an etching from Damien Hirst’s Sanctum series from 2009 that shows a yellow butterfly in the centre of an intricate kaleidoscopic pattern created out of butterfly wings. The butterfly wings are depicted in various shades of blue, purple and pink and the geometric composition is made up of concentric circles.

Evocative of stained glass windows in Gothic architecture, Dome explores tensions between the scientific and the aesthetic. The wings used to create the geometric pattern appear like insects on display in a natural history museum. The aesthetic comes into play in the creation of a beautiful pattern exuding kinetic energy that is exciting and mesmerising to look at.

For Hirst, the butterfly is a ‘universal trigger’ that many people share in finding attractive and joyous. Recalling someone once saying to him: ‘Butterflies are beautiful, but it’s a shame they have disgusting hairy bodies in the middle,’ Hirst in works like this chose only to display the dazzling wings in Dome. Across the series, the butterfly wing is rendered unrecognisable when viewed at a distance and as part of a larger intricate pattern.