Damien Hirst — Gentle Souled Hidden Garden (2025)

HG132. Gentle Souled Hidden Garden belongs to Damien Hirst's Hidden Gardens, a series of roughly three hundred original paintings that extends and deepens the botanical research begun in the earlier Secret Gardens. Where those works held the garden at a certain distance, here the viewer is brought close: dense, layered vegetation fills the surface and the garden becomes an immersive, almost abstract environment.

The paint field is built from quick but legible strokes of flowers, accumulated in a palette of considerable intensity. Colour gathers on the canvas until the image acquires a physical, three-dimensional structure, form and hue emerging from the continuous stratification of marks. Cutting across that apparent botanical order are energetic splashes of paint — interventions Hirst has described as akin to pollen, an element that invades the visual space and heightens its sensory charge, introducing a tension between control and accident, representation and gesture.

Within these lush scenes the series returns to themes central to the artist's practice: the abundance of nature, its vitality, and the difficulty of containing it. The garden becomes a metaphor for a fragile equilibrium between order and chaos, between the human wish to organise the natural world and the autonomy it retains. Hirst's standing is institutional as well as commercial — works held by Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and LACMA, and a central position among the Young British Artists — and the market for his painting has shown itself mature and selective, with demand concentrated on works of quality and solid provenance. This canvas comes from HENI, the primary channel for the distribution of the artist's work, and is signed on the reverse.