Fact sheet DHI - Memento 4

Damien Hirst
Memento 04 (2007)
Etching from the Memento Series
120 x 108 cm
Signed Edition of 30 Copies
Numbered on the verso in Roman Numerals
Hirst introduced butterflies to his work 30 years ago, at his first solo show In and Out of Love in 1991.
For his butterfly paintings, Hirst uses natural butterflies, generally setting them against a canvas painted in a
single bright colour. They are frequently either arranged in a dense mosaic, recalling stained-glass windows, or
scattered loosely across a canvas painted with household gloss. The works comprising ‘The Souls on Jacob’s
Ladder Take Their Flight’ and ‘Memento’ are a dramatic departure from this formula. Here, Hirst confronts us
with gigantic butterflies set against a stark background of sombre black. At first glance their colours seem
natural but they are, in fact, entirely of the artist’s own choosing.
In order to make the plates,10 x 8in(25.4 x 20.32cm) transparencies of the six butterfly specimens that Hirst
had selected were sent to Michael Taylor at Paupers Press. These were scanned, scaled up and the resulting
digital files used to prepare the films for the gravure plates. After exposing gelatin-coated copper plates to the
films, they were placed in a series of acid baths and the image thereby etched into the plate. This single gravure
plate alone was not enough to achieve the desired depth of colour, so a second plate was used to print a flat
background colour aquatint. This aquatint plate was prepared by printing the gravure plate, inked in black,
onto a sheet of paper and immediately running a blank copper plate through the press, transferring a ‘ghost
image’ of the butterfly onto the copper plate. Stop-out varnish is applied to all areas of the plate, except the
‘ghost image’. Following this, the plate is aquatinted and put into an acid bath and, thanks to the stop-out
varnish, only the shape of the butterfly is bitten into the plate. For the black background two additional
aquatint plates were made using the same method. However, instead of the surrounding areas being stopped
out with varnish, for these two plates the ‘ghost image’ itself was covered to protect it from the acid bath.
Printing the butterflies was a very time-consuming process. Due to the large size of the plates it takes over an
hour to ink up a plate and another half-hour to print it. Generally the order of the printing was as follows: a
background colour is printed first using the colour aquatint plate, inked with either a flat colour or a mixed
colour depending on the butterfly. The gravure plate is overprinted next and after that the two black aquatint
plates for the saturated black background. All four plates are printed in immediate succession. Given this
labour-intensive process two printers can print between five to seven butterflies per day.