Damien Hirst: Home Sweet Home

This limited-edition glazed white porcelain plate by Damien Hirst is screenprinted with the color photographic image of a brimming glass ashtray. It was published by Gagosian in 1996, the same year as his exhibition No Sense of Absolute Corruption at the gallery’s Wooster Street location in New York, which featured Party Time (1995), a large-scale sculpture of an ashtray, eight feet in diameter, filled with butts.

Hirst’s work often addresses themes of life and death, and the cigarette has long been one of his favorite motifs. He has referred to the cigarette pack as birth, the match as god, lighting up as the spark of life, and the ashtray as death. “Cigarettes are such clinical forms,” he has commented. “They are like pills. They have a purity before you smoke them. . . . From the point you light one to when you stub it out, it’s death.” This interest is consistent with Hirst’s use of other imagery and materials related to danger and mortality, including drugs, medical equipment, and animal corpses.