Forgotten Promises

With full-color plates of paintings and sculptures, this title was produced for the inaugural exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong, Damien Hirst: Forgotten Promises. It includes For Heaven’s Sake (2008), a life-size human baby skull cast in platinum and covered in 8,128 pink and white diamonds, as well as beautiful diamond cabinets in gold and silver. A group of paintings from 2008 to 2009, including Age of Magnificence and Fading Magnificence, show real butterflies entombed in layers of shiny metallic paint. The new Love Paintings are painted in oil with painstaking attention to realistic detail. Why else would you do it, when you could just get a photograph that looks identical? Hirst has said. But it’s not the same thing, is it? A photograph is from a moment, a split second. Painting is about stopping to look at the world, considering it, and giving it more and more importance.