Skull With Ashtray And Lemon
Signed Print

Name: Skull With Ashtray And Lemon
Brand: Damien Hirst
Rating: 5 (233 reviews)

Damien Hirst

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Medium: Screenprint

Edition size: 100

Year: 2009

Size: H 46cm x W 37cm

Signed: Yes

Format: Signed Print

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Track auction value trend

The value of Damien Hirst's Skull With Ashtray And Lemon (signed) is estimated to be worth between £50,000 and £80,000. This screenprint, created in 2009, has an auction history of one sale on 15th March 2019. The artwork has shown an average annual growth rate of 12%. This work is rare to the market and part of a limited edition of 100.

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Auction Results

Auction Date	Auction House	Location	Hammer Price	Return to Seller	Buyer Paid
March 2019	Christie's London	United Kingdom

Meaning & Analysis

Skull With Ashtray And Lemon is a signed screen print by British artist, Damien Hirst, released in 2009 in an edition of 100. Published by Other Criteria, this work depicts a drawing of a skull, ashtray, and lemon on a deep blue background. In a distinct way it depicts a skull, a theme that Hirst has explored elsewhere.

Skull With Ashtray And Lemon is a unique print in Hirst’s oeuvre. It is indicative of his persistent interest in skulls, but uses the memento mori in a novel way: one need only to look to Hirst’s For The Love Of God sculpture, produced in 2007, to see that he had continually explored the theme of the skull. In this print it seems a bit more sinister. The skull, a symbol of death, is pared with an ashtray – again a symbol of illness and decay. The lemon provides ambiguity. Whilst it is a bitter fruit, its colour here contrasts with the rest of the print.

This is a print of a painting of the same name that Hirst produced in 2007. The painting, he suggests, expresses his sense of mortality. In an interview with Time Out in October 2009, Hirst stated that he could “quitetly express those things in paintings, but there was no way I could express that in a spin or a spot and it was stratting to gnaw away at me”. In response, the artist produced these types of works. As Hirst stated, this painting and art more generally “is a great way to look at the darkness without having to look at it directly”.

Damien Hirst, born in Bristol in 1965, is often hailed the enfant terrible of the contemporary art world. His provocative works challenge conventions and his conceptual brilliance spans installations, paintings, and sculptures, often exploring themes of mortality and the human experience. As a leading figure of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement in the late '80s, Hirst's work has dominated the British art scene for decades and has become renowned for being laced with controversy, thus shaping the dialogue of modern art.

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