- British
- Contemporary
- Member of YBAs
- Britain's richest living artist
- Closely linked to collector Charles Saatchi
- The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965. While still a student at Goldsmith's College in 1988, he curated the now renowned student exhibition, Freeze, held in east London. In this exhibition, Hirst brought together a group of young artists who would come to define cutting-edge contemporary art in the 1990s. In 1991, he had his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery, entitled In and Out of Love, in which he filled the gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies, some of which were hatched from the monochrome canvases that hung the walls. In 1992, he was part of the ground breaking Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. In this show, he exhibited his now famous Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. That same year he was nominated for the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize, and later won that coveted award in 1995.
Hirst's best known works are his paintings, medicine cabinet sculptures, and glass tank installations. For the most part, his paintings have taken on two styles. One is an arrangement of color spots with titles that refer to pharmaceutical chemicals, known as Spot paintings. The second, his Spin paintings, are created by centrifugal force, when Hirst places his canvases on a spinner, and pours the paint as they spin. In the medicine cabinet pieces Hirst redefines sculpture with his arrangements of various drugs, surgical tools, and medical supplies. His tank pieces, which contain dead animals, that are preserved in formaldehyde, are another kind of sculpture and directly address the inevitable mortality of all living beings. All of Hirst's works contain his ironic wit, and question art's role in contemporary culture.
Hirst's first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery, entitled No Sense of Absolute Corruption, was in 1996 at the now-closed SoHo location in New York. Superstition was Damien Hirst's first show at the Beverly Hills space.
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/damien-hirst/
Hirst explores the uncertainty at the core of human experience; love, life, death, loyalty and betrayal through unexpected and unconventional media. Best known for the ‘Natural History’ works, which present animals in vitrines suspended in formaldehyde such as the iconic The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) and Mother and Child Divided (1993), his works recast fundamental questions concerning the meaning of life and the fragility of biological existence. For Hirst, the vitrine functions as both window and barrier, seducing the viewer into the work visually while providing a minimalist geometry to frame, contain and objectify his subject. In many of the sculptures of the 1990s, such as The Acquired Inability to Escape (1991) and The Asthmatic Escaped (1992) a human presence was implied through the inclusion of relic-like objects: clothes, cigarettes, ashtrays, tables and chairs. That implied human presence became explicit in Ways of Seeing (2000), a vitrine sculpture with a figure of a laboratory technician seated at a desk looking through a microscope. The more celebratory work Hymn (2000), a polychrome bronze sculpture, reveals the anatomical musculature and internal organs of the human body on a monumental scale. Hirst is equally renowned for his paintings. These include his ‘Butterfly Paintings’, tableaux of actual butterflies suspended in paint, or in Amazing Revelations (2003), for instance, he arranged thousands of butterfly wings in a mandala-like pattern. His ‘Spin’ series are made with a machine that centrifugally disperses the paint steadily poured onto a shaped canvas surface, while his ‘Spot’ series have a rigorous grid of uniform sized dots. Recently, he has explored photo-realism in the ‘Fact’ paintings.
http://www.whitecube.com/artists/hirst/
Damien Hirst is a British painter, sculptor, and designer who has become the most controversial artist of his generation in England. He attended Goldsmiths College in London where he held his first exhibition. His youthful fascination with death surfaces in most of his works, including his most famous, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. This piece was created by placing a dead tiger shark in glass and steel tank of preserving fluid. Hirst was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995 for his work Mother and Child Divided, consisting of four tanks containing the severed halves of a cow and its calf.
http://wwar.com/masters/h/hirst-damien.html
Damien Hirst is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists (or YBAs). Hirst dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990's and is internationally known for his animals (often bifurcated) in formaldehyde filled vitrines. These arresting images have made him the symbol of Britart and one of the world's most expensive living artists.
Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol. He grew up in Leeds before graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London where he was the dominant figure of a generation of British artists emanating originally from Goldsmiths College.
In 1995 he won the Turner Prize and in 1997 took part in the Sensations exhibition at the Royal Academy. Shortly after these two events, his reputation and influence in the artworld were solidified. In 2008, Hirst was bestowed the title of most powerful person in the artworld in Art Review's annual Power 100 List.
Hirst has always presented himself as an entrepreneur, artist and celebrity. Most recently, Hirst's September 2008 sale at Sotheby's in London, entitled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, grossed £111 million and broke every rule in the book. Hirst subverted his dealers and went straight to the auction room putting on an exhibition rivaling any museum retrospective. The sale coincided with the collapse of two international banking giants, signaling the beginning of the credit crunch, but the sale was unaffected by the events and cemented the power and influence of the Hirst brand.
As an artist, Hirst works in a variety of mediums including installation, sculpture, painting and printed work. The works on paper presented here represent a range of subjects that deal with the quintessentially Hirst themes of mortality, decay, nature and humanity.
http://www.coskunfineart.com/biography.asp?artistID=49
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