Since the 1980s, contemporary artist Damien Hirst has used medicine boxes in his work "as a means of creating or denying historical patterns." Besides his ongoing "Medicine Cabinet" series, Pharmacy is probably the most well-known of his drug works, an installation first shown in 1992 at Cohen Gallery in New York City. The installation is large, but its components are made to scale. In a new series debuting soon at Paul Stopler Gallery in London, Hirst goes bigger with his pill and bottle sculptures and provides what Evening Standard refers to as a "fresh journey into the intersections of religion, science, and illness."
"Pills are a brilliant little form, better than any minimalist art," says Hirst in a press release for the "Schizophrenogenesis" exhibition. "They’re all designed to make you buy them... they come out of flowers, plants, things from the ground, and they make you feel good, you know, to just have a pill, to feel beauty." The series includes sculptures of Sudafed, Zarontin, and other drugs you can't pronounce, as well as 30 Warholian silkscreen prints of The Cure, which depicts a capsule in a rainbow of colors.
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"Schizophrenogenesis" opens on Oct. 9 and will show through Nov. 15.
[via PSFK]
