“I am excited to welcome visitors into the Center’s third-floor galleries following a successful public reopening,” says Director Courtney J. Martin. “Love, Life, Death, and Desire highlights the depth of our collection and presents how artists over the centuries have engaged with some of the most consuming themes related to the human condition.”
Taking up two floors of the Woodstock Street Gallery between June 21 and July 26, 1991, Hirst’s first solo exhibition comprised a room of live butterflies and an installation titled Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays. Today, the permanent half of that iconic installation is part of the Center’s collection—featuring eight paintings in bright pastel colors, each with dead butterflies pressed into their surfaces of high gloss paint; four ashtrays loaded with cigarette butts on a table; and four large cubes, each with a hole on every side.