Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst (1965- ), British artist, one of the most controversial and provocative of recent years, who is known chiefly for works that consist of animals or their vital organs preserved in formaldehyde, or installations in which animals, such as living insects, are used.

Hirst was born in Bristol and from 1986 to 1989 studied at Goldsmiths College in London. He first came to prominence in 1988, while still a student, when he organized the exhibition Freeze in a London warehouse in which both his own work and that of his contemporaries was displayed. In 1991 he had his first one-man show, A Sign of Life, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London.

Among his most notorious works are those in the Natural History series. This consists of works in which animals and parts of animals are preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in glass cases. The title of the series refers to Hirst’s desire that art should have an impact similar to that of unusual creatures in a museum of natural history. One of his most striking works in this vein is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991, Saatchi Collection, London), a 4-m (14-ft) tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde. The work that brought him wider fame, and for which he is so far chiefly remembered, is Mother and Child, Divided, which he created for the Venice Biennale of 1993 and which in 1995 won him the Turner Prize. The piece consists of a cow and a calf both split in half lengthways and presented in separate tanks of formaldehyde. The work is all the more powerful and disturbing since it is familiar animals that Hirst has chosen to endow with the pathos of separation and isolation.

In 1994, Hirst was the curator of an exhibition of works by contemporary artists entitled Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away at London’s Serpentine Gallery. Among his other significant works are: The Lovers (Spontaneous, Committed, Detached, Compromising) (1991), consisting of the brains and entrails of two cows mixed together and packed into preserving jars; In & Out of Love (1991), an installation in which butterflies hatched from pupae, fed, mated, and died in the gallery; and Away From the Flock (1994), a lamb displayed in a case of formaldehyde.

Hirst’s aesthetic premise appears to be based on both artistic nihilism—he has said: “I sometimes feel I have nothing to say. Sometimes I want to communicate this.”—and on using the viewer’s inner feelings as a catalyst to the interpretation of his work. In connection with such works as Mother and Child, Divided, in which the viewer may feel revulsion or fascination, he has said: “I access people’s worst fears. I like the idea of a thing to describe a feeling.” In 1997 Hirst published I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now. His work was shown in Berlin in 1998 and in New York in 1999. In 2003 Hirst opened a show in London containing religious works, many of which were based on the life of Jesus Christ and the Disciples, including Apostles, a series of cabinets containing religious objects, medical equipment, and blood, representative of the martyrdoms of the Disciples and Ascension of Christ. The Elusive Truth show at the Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2005 exhibited photo-realist oil paintings. The body of work on show, which had been executed over the previous three years, was not well received by critics.

A number of Hirst’s works were lost in 2004, when an art warehouse in London burnt down. Hirst hit the news headlines again in 2007 when his most recent work, the mould of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with diamonds, entitled For the Love of God, went on display in the White Cube Gallery, London. Made at a cost of some £15 million, it was placed on the market at £50 million, giving rise to the claim that it was the most expensive piece of contemporary art to date.