Damien Hirst

Born 1965 in Bristol. One of Britain's most famous artists.

Biography & Career

From 1986 Hirst studied at Goldsmiths College in London, where he finished his studies in 1989 with a BA degree in Fine Arts. In 1988, he curated the students' exhibition "Freeze", which was a great success and considerably boosted his career. The group show also featured artists like Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, which were then, amongst others, referred to as the Young British Artists (YBAs). In 1995 Hirst won the famous Turner Prize.

In 2002, his installation "Lullaby Spring" was sold for a record-making price of £9.65m. One of Hirst's famous works "For the Love of God", a cast of a human skull made of platimum encrusted with diamonds, was sold for £50m to a consortium in 2007 (Pooke 17). The sculpture's exceedingly high value originates from its 8,601 flawless or near-flawless diamonds and the 2,156 grams of platinum used.

Hirst is not only an artist, but since 2003 he is also an art collector. He owns an impressive private collection with over 1,000 artworks, including works by Francis Bacon (artist), Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Banksy, as well as works of his YBA contemporaries like Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas. To exhibit the "Murderme"-collection, as Hirst called it, he bought a 300-room manor house in the Cotswolds in 2005, which is being converted into a public museum. The following quote from 2007 emphasizes Hirst's motivation: "I don't see what else you can spend your money on. If you want to own things, art is a pretty good bet. Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That's as close as you can get to immortality" (Pooke 16).

Works

His works can be divided into three main groups (Adams 199): paintings, including spot paintings and spin paintings, cabinet sculptures and glass tank pieces. The spot paintings show randomly arranged coloured spots and are named after pharmaceutical chemicals and products. For the spin paintings, paint was simply thrown on a spinning wheel, so that every painting's unique composition results from the centrifugal force. This was a process which Hirst did not perform himself every time. Instead, he had assistants doing so. Hirst's aim was to carry on Andy Warhol's thought of art as manufactured product fitting into mass culture (Pooke 165).

The cabinet sculptures are installations, for which Hirst put surgical instruments and pillboxes with fastidious arrangement into cupboards and shelves. His glass tank pieces contain dead or disassembled animals. The cadavers are conserved in formaldehyde. One of his most famous works is the glass tank installation "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", originated in 1991. It exhibits a tiger shark, preserved in an aquarium filled with formaldehyde. The liquid resembles water, in order to make the shark seem alive. The spectators are directly confronted with their worst fears, apparently facing death. This awareness of their own mortality shall give them new vital force.

For his 1991 installation "In and Out of Love", Hirst put hundreds of living butterflies into a gallery room, several of which hatching from pupae which were attached to monochrome canvases on the wall, as well as dead specimens embedded into gloss paint on canvases. His intention was to show one thing - the butterfly - at the same time as a living organism and as an aesthetic object. This also can be transferred to art, which can be viewed as a living and creative process, or a collection of masterpieces. One of his art's main aims is the examination of the processes of life and death. Hirst himself says that he wants to give those who look at his work the energy to go away and think about their lives again.

Sources

Adams, Brooks et al. Ed. Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Gray, John "Damien Hirst: The Icon Disassembled." Re-Object. Ed. Eckhard Schneider. Köln: König, 2007. 158f. [exact page numbers needed]

Hirst, Damien. Damien Hirst: Pictures from the Saatchi Gallery. London: Booth-Clibborn Ed., 2001.

Kent, Sarah. Shark Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s. London: Zwemmer, 1994.

Pooke, Grant. Contemporary British Art: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2001.