William H. Bradley

The first part of the essay will be about his life and career and in second part I will focus on analyzing influences on his work.

William H. Bradley was an American artist, editor, engraver, illustrator, designer and typographer who is best known today for his Art Nouveau posters. He was born in 1868 in Boston, Massachusetts. His excitement for art had been built from his childhood because his father was a cartoonist. After his father’s death he got his first job at the age of 12 which was also the first time he got in touch with printing and typography as a printer for weekly magazine. After moving to Chicago he obtained a job as an illustrator for ‘’The Island Printer’’ and also for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.

William Bradley is considered as one of the most influential American Art Nouveau artist. He mostly got an inspiration from English artists, particularly designer William Morris and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. He was also behind the popularization of posters in USA.

It is hard to imagine how difficult it had been for him to earn a living in such an early age and be able to reach the position when he was at his best. Because as fulltime worker he did not had time to study but he was a self taught. Fortunately his job and everything he did for a living was actually the study environment for him.

He dedicated a big part of his life to American publishing and his career was closely connected as well. The Saturday Evening Post called him the “dean of American design’’.

Some of his posters and covers can be seen in a collection of works created for several magazines called “The Chap-Book” where are the earliest examples of Art Nouveau in United States.

Examples from The Chap-Book

He later on published his own magazine called Bradley: His Book which is a periodical containing compilations of poetry, stories, and sketches.

When we go into the details on his style we can clearly say how much he was influenced by William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley. No wonder he was called an American Beardsley, because his work has many similarities. The most emphasizing elements I have noticed are lively curves into serried springs. I think it is most used for hair as seen on the book cover. 

Also for dresses as it is on the cover of The Chap-Book.

Another element I observed which many Art Nouveau artists have in common is nature-inspired lines.  However the way Bradley did that certainly shows the relation to Morris William’s style where we can also see focus on botanical elements with organized layout. 

References:

http://www.willbradley.com/bio/index.htm

http://www.nga.gov/education/tchan_5_18.shtm

http://www.3d-dali.com/Artist-Biographies/Will_H_Bradley.html

http://www.antique-marks.com/art-nouveau-artists.html

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1032864/graphic-design/242771/Modernist-experiments-between-the-world-wars

Henri de Toulous-Lutrec Essay

In my essay I will be writing about French artist Henri de Toulous-Lutrec who was born in 24 November, 1864 into an aristocratic family in southern France. His parents were first cousins in result of which he was often sick and had many health complications. He drank a lot which affected his health. Toulouse-Lautrec died on Sept. 9, 1901, at the family chateau of Malrome.

Toulous-Lutrec was mostly known as small man who did big thinks like his major contribution in the area of advertising. Apart from that he was also a painter, lithographer and illustrator. He was mostly influenced by Art Nouveau style as other artists of the period.

As a child he already had a talent in art. He painted a lot, especially animals which he loved. In his paintings we can really see what he was amazed by. When he was younger he pictured animals mostly horses, because his family had ranch and his father was a passionate hunter. After going to Paris for studies where he discovered a lower entertainment of Montmartre and the pleasure for adults in local brothels he started to be really interested in women who began to appear more in his paintings. It is told that most of the women in his paintings had spent a certain time with him in bed. In his paintings he captured them as how they were and as who they were which was clearly readable. Someone would not give it an attention because of what or who was on the canvas but the way how he visualized them makes it appealing to the viewer. He often hid women's faces behind hair or painted them in positions, postures which emphasized their femininity.

Even though his paintings were excellent, it would not make him so outstanding. What I want to focus on is his influence to an advertisement.

His posters are different to his paintings. What we see in his posters is not only a depiction of reality maybe with beforehand prepared composition but it is mainly well thought out design which is made to meet certain demand and for certain purposes.

When we compare his posters to current posters, there are not too many changes if we do not count the technology. In his posters are elements which are common for current posters and advertisement as emphasizing on typography. So there is not only a plane block of text or just an announcement without visual idea behind that, but he really tried to play with type of fonts, colors and composition. It is amazing how brilliantly he did it, if we think about how limiting it was at that time and the fact that it was something new.

He also focused on graphical side and even on promotion of products, one of the first signs of advertising. It was something different from what people knew, like notice or announcement which only gave people the idea what is going on and eventually caught their attention but Lautrec went much further. He played with human psychology in his posters by convincing them in the way he wanted which still works in today's commercialized world.

There were many artist influenced by Art Nouveau style in his time. One of them was Alphonse Mucha, Czech artist who is known for his Slav Epic. He also did lithography, but his style clearly differs from what Lautrec did. In Mucha's posters the common motif is woman, flowers and plants made into ornaments. His works are much more detailed and complex meanwhile Lautric's work is technically more simple, focusing more on the detail of meaning than to visual details. Mucha's posters looks more like a painting than a poster. I really like details Mucha put into his posters but sometimes it feels distracting. Lautric has it simple and clear which is sometimes better when it concerns advertisement.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Research

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

In this essay I will be focusing on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, his influence to an advertisement and compare him to other artist in same period.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, French postimpressionist painter, lithographer, and illustrator, who documented the bohemian nightlife of late-19th-century Paris.

Toulouse-Lautrec was born in Albi into one of the oldest aristocratic families. Henri was weak and often sick. By the time he was 10 he had begun to draw and paint. At 12 young Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at 14 his right leg. The bones failed to heal properly, and his legs stopped growing. He reached young adulthood with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. During his convalescence, his mother encouraged him to paint. He subsequently studied with French academic painters L. J. F. Bonnat and Fernand Cormon. 

He stayed in the Montmartre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to paint. Circuses, dance halls, nightclubs, racetracks and parisian brothels—all these spectacles were set down on canvas or made into lithographs. Toulouse-Lautrec was very much a part of all this activity. He would sit at a crowded nightclub table, laughing and drinking, and at the same time he would make swift sketches. 

Toulouse-Lautrec preserved his impressions of these places and their celebrities in portraits and sketches of striking originality and power. Outstanding examples are La Goulou Entering the Moulin Rouge (1892, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi), Jane Avril Entering the Moulin Rouge (1892, Courtauld Gallery, London), and Au salon de la rue des Moulins (1894, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec). 

http://www.renoirinc.com/biography/artists/lautrec.htm 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on Nov. 24, 1864, in Albi, France. He was an aristocrat, the son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse and last in line of a family that dated back a thousand years. Henri's father was rich, handsome, and eccentric. His mother was overly devoted to her only living child. Henri was weak and often sick. By the time he was 10 he had begun to draw and paint.
At 12 young Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at 14 his right leg. The bones failed to heal properly, and his legs stopped growing. He reached young adulthood with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He was only 1.5 meters tall.
Deprived of the kind of life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lived wholly for his art. He stayed in the Montmartre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to paint. Circuses, dance halls and nightclubs, racetracks--all these spectacles were set down on canvas or made into lithographs.
Toulouse-Lautrec was very much a part of all this activity. He would sit at a crowded nightclub table, laughing and drinking, and at the same time he would make swift sketches. The next morning in his studio he would expand the sketches into bright-colored paintings.
In order to become a part of the Montmartre life--as well as to protect himself against the crowd's ridicule of his appearance--Toulouse-Lautrec began to drink heavily. In the 1890s the drinking started to affect his health. He was confined to a sanatorium and to his mother's care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol. Toulouse-Lautrec died on Sept. 9, 1901, at the family chateau of Malrome. Since then his paintings and posters--particularly the Moulin Rouge group--have been in great demand and bring high prices at auctions and art sales.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/toulouse-lautrec/

Biography of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1864-1901

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born into an aristocratic family in the south of France in 1864. His father, Count Alphonse, was a notorious eccentric known for all kinds of unpredictable behavior: from washing his socks in the river (unheard of for an aristocrat!) to galloping off to a hunt wearing outlandish costumes, to simply disappearing for long stretches of time. The young Henri never became very close to him.

Unknown at the time, Henri suffered from a genetic condition that prevented his bones from healing properly. Fatefully, at age twelve, he broke his left leg. And at age fourteen, he broke his right leg. Both legs ceased to grow, while the rest of his body continued to grow normally.

At maturity, Lautrec was 4 1/2 feet tall. But his great misfortune was a sort of blessing in disguise, at least from our perspective. After his accidents he was no longer able to follow his father in the typically aristocratic pastimes of riding and hunting. Instead, he focused on sketching and painting.

Art and alcohol

In his late teens, Lautrec was honored to become a student of the artist Fernand Cormon, whose studio was located on the hill above Paris, Montmartre.

When he graduated from Cormon's studio, Lautrec gave himself up fully to the bohemian life, spending much of his time drinking and carousing — and constantly sketching — in cabarets, racetracks, and brothels.

His stunted physique earned him laughs and scorn, and kept him from experiencing many of the physical pleasures offered in Montmartre, a sorrow that he drowned in alcohol. At first it was beer and wine. Then brandy, whiskey, and the infamous absinthe found their ways into his life.

Art and alcohol were his only mistresses, and they were mistresses to which he devoted all of his time and energy. He was doing one or both almost every day of his life until he died.

Adapting the fad for Japanese style (asymmetric composition, flat areas of color) that then pervaded French art to the also burgeoning art of the picture poster, he created thousands of artworks both to memorialize his friends and to advertise their venues. Among those whose images are now a part of art history are the Moulin Rouge dancers Louise Weber (La Goulue) and Jane Avril, and the combative singer/entrepreneur Aristide Bruant.

http://www.lautrec.info/biography.html

Childhood and education

Toulouse-Lautrec’s family was wealthy and had a lineage that extended without interruption back to the time of Charlemagne. He grew up amid his family’s typically aristocratic love of sport and art. Most of the boy’s time was spent at the Château du Bosc, one of the family estates located near Albi. Henri’s grandfather, father, and uncle were all talented draftsmen, and thus it was hardly surprising that Henri began sketching at the age of 10. His interest in art grew as a result of his being incapacitated in 1878 by an accident in which he broke his left thighbone. His right thighbone was fractured a little more than a year later in a second mishap. These accidents, requiring extensive periods of convalescence and often painful treatments, left his legs atrophied and made walking most difficult. As a result, Toulouse-Lautrec devoted ever greater periods to art in order to pass away the frequently lonely hours.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s first visit to Paris occurred in 1872, when he enrolled in the Lycée Fontanes (now Lycée Condorcet). He gradually moved on to private tutors, and it was only after he had passed the baccalaureate examinations, in 1881, that he resolved to become an artist.

His first professional teacher in painting was René Princeteau, a friend of the Lautrec family. Princeteau’s fame, such as it was, arose from his depiction of military and equestrian subjects, done in a 19th-century academic style. Though Toulouse-Lautrec got on well with Princeteau, he moved on to the atelier of Léon Bonnat at the end of 1882. In Bonnat, Toulouse-Lautrec encountered an artist who fought vehemently against deviation from academic rules, condemned the slapdash approach of the Impressionists, and judged Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawing “atrocious.” His work received a more positive reaction in 1883, when he joined the studio of Fernand Cormon.

In the early 1880s, Cormon enjoyed a moment of celebrity, and his studio attracted such artists as Vincent van Gogh and the Symbolist painter Émile Bernard. Cormon gave Toulouse-Lautrec much freedom in developing a personal style. That Cormon approved of his pupil’s work is proved by his choosing Toulouse-Lautrec to assist him in illustrating the definitive edition of the works of Victor Hugo. In the end, however, Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawings for this project were not used.

Despite this approval, Toulouse-Lautrec found the atmosphere at Cormon’s studio increasingly restrictive. “Cormon’s corrections are much kinder than Bonnat’s were,” he wrote his uncle Charles on Feb. 18, 1883. “He looks at everything you show him and encourages one steadily. It might surprise you, but I don’t like that so much. You see, the lashing of my former master pepped me up, and I didn’t spare myself.” The academic regimen of copying became insufferable. He made “a great effort to copy the model exactly,” one of his friends later recalled, “but in spite of himself he exaggerated certain details, sometimes the general character, so that he distorted without trying or even wanting to.” Soon Toulouse-Lautrec’s attendance at the studio became infrequent at best. He then rented his own studio in the Montmartre district of Paris and concerned himself, for the most part, with doing portraits of his friends.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/600695/Henri-de-Toulouse-Lautrec

Art Nouveau was an international design movement that emerged and touched all of the design arts—architecture, fashion, furniture, graphic, and product design—during the 1890s and the early 20th century. Its defining characteristic was a sinuous curvilinear line. Art Nouveau graphic designs often utilized stylized abstract shapes, contoured lines, and flat space inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Artists in the West became aware of ukiyo-e prints as trade and communication between Eastern and Western nations increased during the last half of the 19th century. Building upon the example of the Japanese, Art Nouveau designers made colour, rather than tonal modeling, the primary visual attribute of their graphics.

One of the most innovative posters of the Art Nouveau movement was artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1891 poster of the dancer La Goulue, who was then performing at the Moulin Rouge. Toulouse-Lautrec captured the atmosphere and activity of the dance by reducing imagery to simple, flat shapes that convey an expression of the performance and environment. Although Toulouse-Lautrec only produced about three dozen posters, his early application of the ukiyo-e influence propelled graphic design toward more reductive imagery that signified, rather than depicted, the subject. He often integrated lettering with his imagery by drawing it in the same casual technique as the pictorial elements.

  
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1032864/graphic-design/242768

 /Art-Nouveau?anchor=ref845045

Alphonse Mucha, original name Alfons Maria Mucha (born July 24, 1860, Ivančice, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now in Czech Republic]—died July 14, 1939, Prague, Czechoslovakia), Art Nouveau illustrator and painter noted for his posters of idealized female figures.

After early education in Brno, Moravia, and work for a theatre scene-painting firm in Vienna, Mucha studied art in Prague, Munich, and Paris in the 1880s. He first became prominent as the principal advertiser of the actress Sarah Bernhardt in Paris. He designed the posters for several theatrical productions featuring Bernhardt, beginning with Gismonda (1894), and he designed sets and costumes for her as well. Mucha designed many other posters and magazine illustrations, becoming one of the foremost designers in the Art Nouveau style. His supple, fluent draftsmanship is used to great effect in his posters featuring women. His fascination with the sensuous aspects of female beauty—luxuriantly flowing strands of hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and full-lipped mouths—as well as his presentation of the female image as ornamental, reveal the influence of the English Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic on Mucha, particularly the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The sensuous bravura of the draftsmanship, particularly the use of twining, whiplash lines, imparts a strange refinement to his female figures.
Between 1903 and 1922 Mucha made four trips to the United States, where he attracted the patronage of Charles Richard Crane, a Chicago industrialist and Slavophile, who subsidized Mucha’s series of 20 large historical paintings illustrating the “Epic of the Slavic People” (1912–30). After 1922 Mucha lived in Czechoslovakia, and he donated his “Slavic Epic” paintings to the city of Prague.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/395800/Alphonse-Mucha

Alphonse Mucha, a young Czech artist who worked in Paris, is widely regarded as the graphic designer who took Art Nouveau to its ultimate visual expression. Beginning in<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1371256/0/170/ADTECH;target=_blank;grp=192;key=false;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=1032864;kvchannel=ARTS;misc=1298514507578"></script> the 1890s, he created designs—usually featuring beautiful young women whose hair and clothing swirl in rhythmic patterns—that achieved an idealized perfection. He organized into tight compositions lavish decorative elements inspired by Byzantine and Islamic design, stylized lettering, and sinuous female forms. Like many other designers at the time, Mucha first captured public notice for poster designs, but he also received commissions for magazine covers, packages, book designs, publicity materials, and even postage stamps. In this way, the role and scope of graphic-design activity steadily expanded throughout the period.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1032864/graphic-design/242768/Art-Nouveau?anchor=ref845045

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/6996/Art-Nouveau-poster-advertising-Monaco-Monte-Carlo-lithograph-in-colours





http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/thumbnail/151162/1/Dun,-A-Gordon-Setter-Belonging-To-Comte-Alphonse-De-Toulouse-Lautrec.jpg



http://en.wahooart.com/A55A04/w.nsf/OPRA/BRUE-7Z4QGC/$File/Henri+de+Toulouse-Lautrec+-+Tethered+Horse+.JPG



https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3yPaMKEtUppVCjZCRUiU9LXvF2h2swvvfKpZpLzxzUKRFYnUTLAR22ID4O0KKtuftFCAaicNtjp01LmZ0DKULxaeHRhWvAU9PcIWegR0lVQxmQ5nb5kte7hXRbtHJh37HhcHVkYxan7c/s1600/Toulouse-Lautrac.jpg



http://sexualityinart.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/suzanne-valadon-henri-de-toulouse-lautrec.jpg



http://www.dailyartfixx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/moulin-rouge-la-goulue-large.jpg



http://hawkdog.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Henri-de-Toulouse-Lautrec2.jpg




Documentary:
Toulouse-Lautrec: The Full Story by Waldemar Januzczak (2006)
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de. Video. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Web. 24 Feb. 2011. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/94705/Henri-de-Toulouse-Lautrec-celebrated-the-demimonde-of-Montmartre-in>.

Bibliography:
Stockstad M., Art History Third Edition (2008) Pearson Prentice Hall, Upper Saddler River, New Jersey

Techniques in graffiti

In this essay i would like to investigate the different techniques used in graffitti art.
These include:

Stencils

Stencil graffiti makes use of a paper, cardboard, or other media to create an image or text that is easily reproducible. The desired design is cut out of the selected medium and then the image is transferred to a surface through the use of spray paint or roll-on paint.

The process of stenciling involves applying paint across a stencil to form an image on a surface below. Sometimes multiple layers of stencils are used on the same image to add colours or create the illusion of depth.

Those who make and apply stencils have many motivations. For some, it is an easy method to produce a political message. Many artists appreciate the publicity that their artwork can receive. And some just want their work to be seen. Since the stencil stays uniform throughout its use, it is easier for an artist to quickly replicate what could be a complicated piece at a very quick rate, when compared to other conventional tagging methods.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stencil_graffiti


Markers

Since graffiti and tagging is not restricted to stencil, we can see a lot pieces made by markers.





Tradtional pieces





Airbrushes



The another tool which is used for graffiti is also an aibrush, which has a slightly different to spraying with a can because airbrush make much thinner lines and it is adjustable.


Styles and technique



"as you go all wround the world you;ll see a variety of techniques in different cities"


Chalk, charcoal or thin white paint are ideal for this exercise, basically use something that can be painted over easily.


http://www.howtodrawgraffiti.net/

Damien Hirst

- 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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rESmxFXAd8

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