While contemporary life places a great deal of belief in medicine and science, in other times this was the sole preserve of religion. References to religion appear from early on in Hirst’s career, and the images and narratives associated with Christianity are very familiar to the artist, who was raised as a Roman Catholic. These references to religion can be viewed as being akin to medical preservation as a cultural means of dealing with death.

Hirst has often presented the environment of science in his work, referring to simple schoolroom experiments as well as the sterile environment of the science laboratory, although both are usually inflected with very contrasting associations. Many of his works are placed in industrially constructed glass vitrines, reminiscent of scientific museums as well as shop displays. An ongoing series of vitrines entitled The Acquired Inability to Escape, of which a version is found in gallery 3, introduce the motif of the cigarette into such a sterile environment. In Crematorium (1996) and Burial Ground (2008) the quantity of cigarettes is so multiplied that the allusion to death, and the similarity to the ashes of cremated human remains, is more clearly stated. When Hirst first began introducing cigarettes into his work, they were the subject of intense advertising attention, long after the lethal nature of nicotine addiction was widely known.

Hirst’s Natural History works seen here allude to a variety of belief systems, the sharks in Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, Justice (2008) most expansively. Others refer substantially to religious imagery. Mother and Child (Divided) (1993), Hirst’s first prominent dissected animal vitrine, was shown at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and was later exhibited in the display that won him the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery. The mother and child motif is one of the most well represented images in Christian art, but here the traditional family unit is broken apart quite viscerally. The Incomplete Truth (2006) emulates a religious representation by way of a dove in flight that has, in art and Christian history, come to symbolize the Holy Ghost. The title questions the assumption of total belief.

Along with medical or scientific preservation, religion is a continuous reference point in Hirst’s practice that articulates the means by which we deal with the inevitability of death. These themes are brought together in his butterfly paintings. Comprising many species of butterflies, their intensely vivid and exquisite colors and shapes form a sharp contrast to the reality of looking at specimens of once living creatures, but their display, in more expansive form, is in direct imitation of those found in natural history cabinets in museums all over the world. Butterflies first appeared in Hirst’s work in an installation where they emerged from pupae and flew around amongst visitors, or were imbedded on monochrome canvases, where they appeared to have landed in the wet paint of their surfaces. As the series has evolved representations have included forms that resemble the stained-glass windows of cathedrals or abstract mandala-like patterns.