Items from Pharmacy, the restaurant set up by British artist Damien Hirst, fetched £11,1-million (about R126,7-million) at an auction in London, Sotheby’s said on Tuesday.
The auction of aspirin-styled bar stools, towering medical cabinets, DNA-themed sculptures and molecule-inspired ashtrays that lined the short-lived eatery in fashionable Notting Hill took place on Monday evening.
More than 150 fittings, including 10 of Hirst’s butterfly paintings, were sold off. Auctioneers admitting they were ”astonished” at the total raised.
The fixtures and fittings, which included a sculpture of Hirst’s own DNA helix and the restaurant’s distinctive wallpaper, were removed from the establishment when it closed down in 2003.
A Sotheby’s spokesperson said about 500 bidders crowded into the New Bond Street sale room, in Central London, to compete for 166 lots, which were all sold.
”We have been astounded by the response and by the total, which was far in excess of that predicted,” she said.
Pharmacy became London’s most fashionable spot at the height of Cool Britannia, Britpop and New Labour’s rise to government, holding a star-studded opening dinner on New Year’s Eve 1997.
It was co-owned by Hirst, Matthew Freud, Liam Carson and Jonathan Kennedy.
Oliver Barker, senior director of Sotheby’s contemporary art department in London, said: ”When Pharmacy opened in 1998, it was a landmark restaurant, typifying everything that was happening in Britain at that time, in terms of art, food, celebrity, New Labour and Cool Britannia.”
Hirst, who is known for his animals in formaldehyde, said of the auction: ”Suddenly, my restaurant venture seems to be a success.”
A pair of martini glasses estimated to be worth £50 to £70 fetched £4 800 (about R55 000). One of the restaurant’s giant medicine cabinets, a work entitled The Fragile Truth, sold for £1 237 600 (about R14,1-million), the largest bid of the night and a new auction record for a Hirst piece. — Sapa-DPA