Please note: the dimensions listed include the full margins.

Drugs and medicine are recurring themes in Damien Hirst’s work as he explores the unacceptable idea of death and how we face our own mortality. In Pharmaceuticals, each capsule is meticulously showcased in a sterile cabinet and made cheerful, almost alluring, by the colourful caps designed to make us want to buy them. By displaying the tablets in such a fashionable way, Hirst presents them as a commodity, highlighting the obsession with drugs as a means of providing palliative hope and a short-lived way around death. With society’s praise of modern medicine and pharmaceutical drugs, Hirst observed that “science is the new religion for many people. It’s as simple and as complicated as that really.”