Ever the shrinking violet, Damien Hirst’s new series of screen prints is entitled Eat the Rich, and takes on the pharmaceutical imagery he’s frequently borrowed from previously as its starting point.
The 12 prints each depict pill packaging with the medication’s name replaced with "a word implying violence or force," such as Attack, Killer, Pressure, Stop and Fight. Like with Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets series and his Schizophrenogenesis works, Eat the Rich underscores the artist’s fascination with the human body and the vast pharmaceutical industry built around it, purporting to treat its multitudinous ailments. According to Hirst, medicine packaging uses minimal designs to exude confidence and perpetuate "the modernist fantasy […] that everyone and everything can be cured."
The print series is being sold through the Hirst-founded company Other Criteria, which collaborates with emerging and established artists on artist-based publications, editions, multiples, prints and posters which are on sale in both shops and online.
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