Damien Hirst (b. 1965)

"I want it to look like an artist's studio ... I remember painting something white once and flies landing on it, thinking 'Fuck!' but then thinking it was funny. This idea of an artist trying to make a monochrome and being fucked up by flies landing in the paint or something like that. Then you get the beauty of the butterfly, but it is actually something horrible. It is like a butterfly has flown around and died horribly in the paint. The death of an insect that still has this really optimistic beauty of a wonderful thing. I remember thinking about that. They don't rot like humans" (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst, exh. cat., Naples, 2004, p. 83).