Controversial British artist Damien Hirst has grabbed headlines once again, this time as one of his trademark medicine cabinets has broken the auction sales record for a living artist.

Pills are placed into the Damien Hirst artwork called Lullaby Spring, as it is prepared for display at Sotheby's auction rooms in London. An anonymous bidder purchased the contemporary piece for the equivalent of about $20.6 million Cdn. Pills are placed into the Damien Hirst artwork called Lullaby Spring, as it is prepared for display at Sotheby's auction rooms in London. An anonymous bidder purchased the contemporary piece for the equivalent of about $20.6 million Cdn.
(Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press)
An anonymous bidder has purchased Hirst's contemporary art piece Lullaby Spring for £9.65 million (about $20.6 million Cdn) at a Sotheby's auction in London on Thursday night.

Lullaby Spring is a large steel and glass cabinet that holds more than 6,000 hand-crafted and individually painted pills.

The 2002 artwork is part of a series of four cabinets the 41-year-old artist created using the theme of the four seasons.

The Hirst sale marked the richest sale of an artwork by a living artist at auction.

It bettered the records set by the recent sale of a painting by British portrait artist Lucien Freud a day earlier, and the recent sale of a work by veteran U.S. contemporary painter and printmaker Jasper Johns.

The Sotheby's event, which earned a little over £72 million (about $153.9 million Cdn) and also saw works by Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko cross the block, was the latest in a blockbuster week of record-setting art sales in London.

The Turner Prize-winning Hirst, who rose to fame in the 1990s as Britain's bad-boy artist, most recently made headlines for his piece For the Love of God, a platinum skull covered by 8,601 flawless diamonds. The artist is reportedly entertaining bids of about £50 million (nearly $107 million Cdn) for the piece. 

With files from the Associated Press