“It didn’t come from any of the things that I had, but it came from everything I had.”[1]

‘Standing Alone on the Precipice and Overlooking the Arctic Wastelands of Pure Terror’ is the first work in Hirst’s series of stainless steel pill cabinets. The vast polished cabinet has a mirrored backplate and includes thousands of pills positioned precisely on rows of shelves. The pills are made from resin and plaster and then hand painted. Initial attempts to use real pills were abandoned because the medication would eventually decay. Of the integrity of artistic materials in his work Hirst explains: “They look like real pills; that’s all that matters […] Art’s not real life. I’m into theatre not ‘truth to materials’. The whole dilemma is: Is it real or isn’t it?”[2]

The cabinet can be interpreted as Hirst’s response to Max Beckmann’s idea of painting as a way of dealing with the ‘void’. The early twentieth century artist described, “this unending void whose foreground we constantly have to fill with stuff of some sort in order not to notice its horrifying depth.”[3] Hirst conceived the work whilst in New York preparing for his major solo show at Gagosian Gallery in 2000, ‘Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings’. He describes how he was “hit with an incredible doubt” regarding the cohesion of the exhibition: “I was struggling incredibly hard through all the ideas, all the sculptures, all the titles, everything that was going on in my head, trying to find something that would not just back up this situation, but bypass it – beyond belief […] And I came up with that sculpture. I got out of bed and drew it […] it was crystal fucking clear: the size, the title, everything.”[4]