Damien Hirst Painting Sells For $1.6 Million at Art Stage Singapore

Art Stage Singapore, the premier art fair in Southern Asia (see Take a Spin Through Art Stage Singapore 2015), boasted the sale of a Damien Hirst Butterfly painting, titled Amorous (2008), for $1.6 million, making it the top sale at the fair as of Sunday afternoon.

The Straits Times reports that Aenon Loo of White Cube, Hirst’s London gallery, confirmed the sale, calling Hirst a rare artist “who addresses universal themes through his art. There are issues of life and death, beauty and ugliness, which lend a universal resonance to his art.” The buyer is an anonymous collector from the region.

The work consists of dead butterflies stuck onto a surface of wet paint, creating a large red circle. According to the artnet Price Database, the record for one of the paintings from the Butterfly series is approximately $4 million, for Ascended (2008), which was sold at Hirst’s “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” auction at Sotheby’s London in 2008. Other works from the series have sold for between $1 million and $3 million.