'I’ve got an obsession with death, but I think it’s like celebration of life rather than something morbid. You can’t have one without the other.'
- Damien Hirst

In Damien Hirst’s Happy Head with Base, death forms a canvas for the celebration of life. Kaleidoscopic trails of blue, orange, brown and pink paint collide across the smooth planes and hollowed grooves of a resin skull, converging in a thick ridge along its jawline and spilling down the edges of a wooden base below. The application of paint is consistent with that of the artist’s celebrated ‘Spin’ series, which joyfully imbues the materiality of paint with autonomy and an inherent vital force. Executed in 2007, the present work dates from the same year as Hirst’s notorious For the Love of God, an eighteenth-century human skull cast in platinum, inlaid with its original set of teeth, and encrusted with thousands of flawless diamonds. In both works the aesthetic function of the skull as a memento mori, which recurs throughout the history of art as a reminder of death, is confronted and complicated.

As a young art student in Leeds, Hirst would spend weeks at a time obsessively drawing from cadavers in the local anatomy school. Later, artifacts such as the mosaic mask of Tezcatlipoca in the collection of the British Museum would enact a profound influence on the artist’s practice. Hirst’s obsession with mortality pervades his work, evidenced across his ‘Natural History’ series, meticulously arranged medicine cabinets, and in the delicate butterflies which adorn his intricately mosaicked canvases. ‘I’d always thought about death since I was seven years old,’ Hirst explains, ‘and every day I think about it, it’s different. It goes from being impossible to the only thing. I remember thinking that, in a way, it’s what gives life beauty’ (D. Hirst quoted in Damien Hirst: Relics, exh. cat. Qatar Museums, Doha 2013, p. 29).

For Hirst death serves only to make life itself more vibrant, a notion which displaces any irony embedded within the present work’s title. Amid an oeuvre characterised by exacting precision, Hirst’s spin paintings are some of his most vivacious and frenzied works. If the skull implies transient life and certain mortality, then Hirst’s spin paintings seem to capture and preserve the vigour and animation of paint. Uniting the motif of the skull with the momentum and physicality of the spin series, Hirst suggests a submission to chance, and an acknowledgment of the forces which guide and connect art, life and death. In Happy Head with Base, Hirst flagrantly and exuberantly entwines the threads between each.