Damien Hirst|Fruitful And Forever (H8)

'Fruitful And Forever' put Hirst's 'Cherry Blossoms' into print before the paintings had been seen in a museum. The four prints went on sale in September 2020, the best part of a year before the canvases went on show at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Close to the paint Instead of whole trees, the two images crop in on passages of paint, so the blossom becomes a field of dabs and ridges of colour. That places the prints where the paintings sit closest to abstraction. The 'Cherry Blossoms' draw on Bonnard, Monet and Van Gogh and on Seurat's Pointillist dots, and Hirst sets those small marks against thick, gestural brushwork. In print, the impasto is captured at close range on a smooth laminated face: the relief is photographed, not present. Two titles The titles can be read as a pair. 'Fruitful' looks ahead to the fruit that blossom promises; 'Forever' to the wish to hold a flowering that lasts only days. That pull between abundance and brevity runs through Hirst's long engagement with beauty and death. For Save the Children The sale ran for twelve days, from 15 to 27 September 2020, and the orders placed in that window fixed the size of each edition. All profits went to Save the Children Italia's campaign 'Riscriviamo il Futuro' ('Rewrite the Future'), which supported children from disadvantaged backgrounds whose schooling had been hit by Covid-19 closures. Fondazione Prada in Milan backed and promoted the project, which raised €3.3 million. At auction The strongest result came early. In December 2021 a large 'Forever' sold for €8,820 (about £7,515) with buyer's premium in Sotheby's online Contemporary Art sale in Milan, against an estimate of €1,200 to €1,800. Demand had shown itself even sooner: in February 2021, five months after the release, a large 'Fruitful' reached a hammer price of ¥520,000 (about £3,594) at Mainichi Auction in Tokyo. Results since have come down, and a large 'Fruitful' made £2,394 with fees in an online Phillips London sale in July 2022. Before and after H8 closed a year of butterflies. H7 - Rainbow Editions in May 2020 and H6 - The Elements that summer were both built from wings; 'Fruitful And Forever' turned to paint while keeping H7's charity model of a timed sale. The blossoms then became a run of releases. H9 - The Virtues (2021) printed whole canvases and gave each a title from the samurai code, H15 - Archangels (2024) moved to paper and small editions, and H20 - The Emotions (2026) swapped the cherry tree for the jacaranda.