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Damien Hirst smashes auction record with £111m sale

16/09/2008

An auction of the artist Damien Hirst's work has fetched a record total of £111 million.

Hirst decided to place more than 200 items of his work up for auction at Sotheby's and the auction house was crowded for its final session.

Included within the pieces sold on Monday were The Golden Calf – a bull in a tank of formaldehyde – which went for £9.2 million, The Kingdom – a tiger suspended in the same conditions – which eventually sold for £9.6 million and The Black Sheep with the Golden Horn which raised £2.6 million.

And on Tuesday, Unknown Pleasures, constructed from gold-plated steel, glass and manufactured diamonds, had been expected to sell for between £400,000 and £600,000, but eventually sold for just under £1.8m including buyer's premium.

A butterfly piece entitled Reincarnated went for £1.5 million, far ine excess of its £700,000 estimate.

Hirst entitled the auction Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, and described it as "probably the most amazing show I've put on".

The £111 million total raised yesterday smashed the previous record sale of art sold from a single artist. In 1993 works by Picasso went for £11 million.