Romance in the Age of Uncertainty

This catalogue was produced to accompany Damien Hirst’s 2003 exhibition at White Cube gallery, London. The show dissected and recast the story of Jesus and his disciples through paintings and sculptural work while revealing the uncertainty at the heart of human experience. The exhibited works included The Apostles, a series of 13 clinical steel and glass cabinets filled with medical instruments, weapons, ornaments, blood, and life’s detrius: a dozen canvases encrusted with flies suspended in resin, each given a fatal disease for a title: skinned cows’/bulls’ heads in individual tanks punctured/lacerated/stabbed with knives and glass fragments; and huge canvases embedded with butterfly wings arranged in extraordinary grid systems. This book contains 46 colour illustrations, including many details of the exhibited works and four gatefolds. An introductory essay by Annushka Shani examines each work more closely, drawing out the themes of love, life and death explored by Hirst through this exhibition