modern & contemporary art

Party Time, Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst’s installations are calculated to shock. Party Time, a low, white sculpture in the shape of a gigantic ashtray, contains thousands of actual snuffed-out cigarette butts and prompts questions about smoking and its consequences.

Its artistic predecessor is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a porcelain urinal that the artist signed and submitted to a gallery exhibition; Party Time’s imagery and scale also refer to Claes Oldenburg’s oversized lipstick tubes and clothespins and especially his Giant Fagends, an eight-foot-tall foam sculpture of crushed cigarettes lying on a white plinth.

Architecture, Design & Graphics