High Windows, while trying to emulate the same effect of the famous rose windows of gothic French cathedrals such as Notre Dame in Paris or Chartres, strikes the viewer with its bright colours, and only at a more attentive and close regard unveils the nature of its elements.

Works by Damien Hirst featuring butterflies as a core component have their roots in one of the artist’s most important installations, In and Out of Love, at the Woodstock Street Gallery, London, in 1991. Ten years later, in 2001, Hirst started to realise a new set of ‘butterfly’ works, to which the present tondo belongs. While in the first works, the butterflies seem positioned randomly and with no precise order, from 2005 Hirst starts to arrange the insects in meticulous patterns, staging a kind of revenge of order upon chaos.

The present work is linked to some of the recurrent themes in the artist’s production: religious inspiration, Christian heritage and, above all, the theme of life after death; a theme that, like a fil rouge, is omnipresent in Hirst’s works, from the animals in formaldehyde to the famous diamond-studded skull. These themes were the focus of important exhibitions such as Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, London, White Cube Gallery, 2003.

High Windows was selected as the opening work of the exhibition Superstition organised by Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and London in 2007. The celebrated fashion designer Tom Ford acquired the work at the Los Angeles opening. More recently, while building a new mansion in Santa Fe designed by renowned architect Tadao Ando, Ford decided to sell the present work.