‘A Thousand Years’ and 'A Hundred Years’ were first exhibited at the warehouse exhibition ‘Gambler’, in 1990. ‘A Thousand Years’ is acknowledged by the artist to be one of the most important of his career.
In both works, the vitrine is split in half by a glass wall: a hole in this partition allows newly hatched flies from a box in one half to fly into the other where an Insect-O-Cutor hangs. The corpses of the flies inside the vitrine accumulate whilst the works are on exhibition. In ‘A Thousand Years’, a decaying cow’s head is presented beneath the fly-killer.
Hirst describes how, having come round to the idea of the validity of “new art” and having made the spot paintings and the ‘Medicine Cabinets’, he felt he had lost something, “in terms of the belief I had in whether [art] was real or not.” Feeling the need to make “something about something important”, and having already worked with flies, maggots and butterflies, whilst at Goldsmiths, he decided to create a “life cycle in a box.” The structure was partially inspired by American minimalism and the industrial materials Hirst had seen in the work of Grenville Davey and Tony Cragg. The shape of the vitrine drew from Francis Bacon’s technique of framing his figures within box shapes. Of the influence of Bacon’s frames to his work. Hirst has explained: “it’s a doorway, it’s a window; it’s two-dimensional, it’s three-dimensional; he’s thinking about the glass reflecting.”
http://www.damienhirst.com/a-hundred-years
In both works, the vitrine is split in half by a glass wall: a hole in this partition allows newly hatched flies from a box in one half to fly into the other where an Insect-O-Cutor hangs. The corpses of the flies inside the vitrine accumulate whilst the works are on exhibition. In ‘A Thousand Years’, a decaying cow’s head is presented beneath the fly-killer.
Hirst describes how, having come round to the idea of the validity of “new art” and having made the spot paintings and the ‘Medicine Cabinets’, he felt he had lost something, “in terms of the belief I had in whether [art] was real or not.” Feeling the need to make “something about something important”, and having already worked with flies, maggots and butterflies, whilst at Goldsmiths, he decided to create a “life cycle in a box.” The structure was partially inspired by American minimalism and the industrial materials Hirst had seen in the work of Grenville Davey and Tony Cragg. The shape of the vitrine drew from Francis Bacon’s technique of framing his figures within box shapes. Of the influence of Bacon’s frames to his work. Hirst has explained: “it’s a doorway, it’s a window; it’s two-dimensional, it’s three-dimensional; he’s thinking about the glass reflecting.”
http://www.damienhirst.com/a-hundred-years