Executed in 1992 and monumental in scale, We’re Afraid of Nothing hails from the earliest period of Damien Hirst’s ground-breaking career, and echoes the themes most integral to the artist’s visual lexicon: life and death and the precarious threshold in between. Comprising row upon row of neatly arranged pharmaceutical boxes and bottles bearing cautionary labels, the present work stands alongside important, early examples of Hirst's iconic corpus of Medicine Cabinets, of which numerous are held within museum collects ions, such as The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Pretty Vacant, 1989) and the Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen München (E.M.I., 1989). With the addition of a ladder that serves to heighten the immersive quality of this body of work, We’re Afraid of Nothing denotes the crystallisation of Hirst's visual engagement with pharmaceuticals – an extensive and highly significant engagement that found its ultimate articulation the very same year this work was created with the full-scale Pharmacy installation. As a work that encompasses the breadth of the artist's output to date, We are Afraid of Nothing represents the moment at which the dialogue between science, religion, art and death coalesced to form the very backbone of Hirst's oeuvre.

Hirst created his first Medicine Cabinets in 1989 for his degree show at Goldsmiths in London, and was so fascinated by the endless possible permutations and the potential behind the idea that he continued to refine the concept to increasing levels of precision. In an interview with art historian and curator Nicholas Serota, Hirst recalled the creation of the early works in the series: “In the first twelve, I’d done all that arranging in the same way that I was doing in a painting. I’d played around with them for ages and moved things and then it was as if I wasn’t there when I’d done it. So I think it was a way for me to do that, without ramming it down people’s throats. You can’t do paintings like Rauschenberg forever.” (Damien Hirst quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate, Damien Hirst, 2012, p. 94). In the same interview the artist declared that the first of his works that he was ever truly satisfied with was a Medicine Cabinet, indicating the immense significance of the series within his early career (ibid., p. 93).

The Medicine Cabinet works stand alongside Hirst’s iconic series of Pharmaceutical Paintings, more commonly referred to as the Spot Paintings, in their investigation into mortality and medicinal science. Indeed, each painting in the series is titled after exotic sounding pharmaceutical substances listed in the Sigma Chemical Company’s catalogue Biochemical Organic Compounds for Research and Diagnostic Reagents. Conceived at the same pivotal moment in Hirst’s career, both series are imbued with the same measured rational order and pleasing formal cogency of his iconic Pharmacy store vitrines; yet where the brightly coloured Spot Paintings conceptually denote specific drugs, the Medicine Cabinet works instead offer model replicas of such drugs, encased in vibrant, pristine medical packaging equipped with warning labels and dosage instructions. In its carefully selected assortment of medical packages, boxes and bottles enclosed within its eight shelves, We are Afraid of Nothing signifies the progression of existence itself, presenting the ‘tools’ required to maintain a long and healthy life – or indeed the tools required to evade death.

The present work and the other Medicine Cabinets channel a Pop Art ideal in their presentation of quotidian commercial goods: a re-imagining of consumer commodities as previously emphasised by Andy Warhol in works such as the monumental Campbell’s Soup Cans from 1962, or Jeff Koons, in works such as Three Ball 50 / 50 Tank from 1985, both in the collects ion of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Arthur C. Danto has articulated this notion with reference to the Medicine Cabinets: “Damien Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets series, projects a certain, latter-day Pop Art aesthetic – colourful, brash, and familiar to a community of consumers – and at the same t.mes it connects with the artist’s philosophical preoccupations with birth and death, as well as with his deep belief that art heals” (Arthur C. Danto, “Damien Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets: Art, Death, Sex, Society and Drugs” in: Exh. Cat., New York, L&M Arts, Damien Hirst: The Complete Medicine Cabinets, 2010, p. 5).

We’re Afraid of Nothing thus becomes a repository of seeming immortality; a shrine to the new religion of science. Evoking the trusting faith of the general public in the power of pills and modern medical interventions to cure all ills, Hirst interrogates the margin between life and death, deftly engaging with the paragon between science and art in contemporary society. The present work thus powerfully distils the most critical themes of Hirst’s oeuvre, the myriad pill boxes and bottles together manifesting a modern-day memento mori, or a deafening reminder of the inevitability of death.