Home > Views > Blogs > Figure Painting > Art for AIDS: Damien Hirst's Pill Cabinet
PRINT
RSS
SHARE
TEXT SIZE:
Send a copy to me

Separate multiple email addresses (max 20) with commas.

0/1500
Letters are not case-sensitive, disregard spaces.
captcha image
Try a New One
This helps us prevent automated registrations and spamming.

Main
Tax Fraud, FBI Raids, and Jasper Johns   Irving Penn Snaps Bacon, Duchamp, Jo...
Feb 4 2008 12:28PM EST

Art for AIDS: Damien Hirst's Pill Cabinet

The preview exhibition for The (RED) Auction opens today at Larry Gagosian's 21st Street gallery. The auction is an initiative to harness the big money coursing through the art market to the cause of fighting AIDS in Africa, and there's more than a few heavy hitters involved: U2 frontman-turned-activist Bono is behind PRODUCT (RED), which partners with companies like Gap and Apple to create products that raise money for the Global Fund's African AIDS programs. Damien Hirst, he of the $100 million skull, corralled the 72 lots in the auction by writing (in his own hand) 100 letters to artists ranging from Jasper Johns to Banksy. Gagosian and Sotheby's, competitors under most circumstances, have come together, with the gallery showing the works for the next two weeks and the auction house selling them on February 14th. Figure Painting will be looking closer at the sale in the coming days, highlighting particularly interesting lots and taking in the bigger picture, too. First up:

Damien Hirst, the artist-ringleader of this operation, donated no less than seven of his works to The (RED) Auction, including the lot that carries the highest estimate — Where There's A Will, There's A Way, expected to fetch $5 million - $7 million. It's a gleaming stainless steel cabinet filled with pills, an extension of Hirst's Lullaby series, one of which earned him the title of most expensive living artist at auction when it brought £9.65 million at Sotheby's London last June. The groups of three pills that meticulously line the rows of shelves in the cabinet are, in fact, replicas of the antiretroviral drugs used to fight HIV and AIDS.

Lot%2054%20-%20Hirst%2C%20Where%20There%27s%20a%20Will%2C%20There%27s%20a%20Way.jpg
Damien Hirst, Where There's A Will, There's A Way, ©Damien Hirst, Photography by Prudence Cuming Associates

Loading...


Recent Blog Posts

Archive

Jul 2008



Also in Portfolio.com
Most Emailed
Recently Commented