Damien Hirst|The Aspects (H6)

'The Aspects' brought Hirst's butterflies into HENI's numbered prints and gave them a scriptural frame. Read in order, its five titles follow a single verse of the Bible. Five aspects of God In Exodus 34:6, God passes before Moses and is proclaimed, in the King James Bible, "merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth". 'Mercy', 'Grace', 'Patience', 'Goodness' and 'Truth' take those qualities one by one, in the same order, with patience standing in for longsuffering. That suggests the aspects of the title are aspects of God. The butterfly suits the theme. The ancient Greeks took it for the soul and Christian art for the resurrection, and Hirst prizes it for staying as beautiful in death as in life. Wings like stained glass Every composition is built from blue and white wings, which give the set the look of a stained glass window. The patterns change from panel to panel. 'Mercy' is split down the middle, and 'Grace' is divided into quarters around a single light blue pair. Eight black lines radiate from the centre of 'Patience'. 'Goodness' grows from a six-pointed star, and 'Truth' turns to concentric rings, a nod to Hirst's 'Mandalas'. The wings are printed images rather than real specimens, and the panel is flat. At auction 'Grace' holds the best single-print result of the last five years. At Phillips London in June 2022 one sold for £46,620, fees included. Three months later, in the same saleroom, another 'Grace' fetched £18,900, a sign of how far single results can swing in an edition this small. The series record is older: in September 2020 a complete set made £94,500 with buyer's premium when Sotheby's offered it online in Made in Britain. Before and after Before 'The Aspects', HENI's numbered prints were about colour, from H3 - Colour Charts to H5 - Colour Space. Here Hirst turned the sequence to the butterfly. A year later the H6 number continued with H6 - The Elements (2020), four prints that carried the kaleidoscope through the colours of earth, air, fire and water. The wings came back again in H10 - The Empresses (2022), now red and black and finished with glitter.