Damien Hirst

Since the late 1980s, Damien Hirst has worked across installation, sculpture, painting, and drawing to explore the complex relationship between art, life, and death. His work interrogates belief systems including scientific, religious, and economic frameworks, and dissects the uncertainties that underpin human experience.

Hirst’s interest in death as an “unacceptable idea” emerged during his teenage years in Leeds. At sixteen, he began making regular visits to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School to produce life drawings—a formative experience later echoed in the photographic work With Dead Head (1991). This period shaped his awareness of the contradiction inherent in confronting mortality through art.

At Goldsmiths College, Hirst redefined his understanding of sculpture and painting. He began work on the Medicine Cabinets in his second year, works that paired Minimalist aesthetics with a conceptual critique of pharmacological authority. These cabinets marked the beginning of Hirst’s long-running engagement with the idea of science as a surrogate for spiritual belief.

In 1991, he initiated his most iconic body of work, Natural History, in which preserved animals are suspended in steel and glass vitrines filled with formaldehyde. Among them, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991)—a tiger shark displayed at the Saatchi Gallery’s Young British Artists I exhibition—became an emblem of British art in the 1990s. The series exemplifies Hirst’s interest in how museum-like display mechanisms shape perception.

Over the decades, Hirst has continued to return to recurring themes including mortality, faith, beauty, science, and value. In 2007, he presented For the Love of God at White Cube, a platinum cast of a human skull set with 8,601 flawless pavé-set diamonds. Monumental and theatrical, the work underscores the tension between material permanence and spiritual transience.

Hirst has remained prolific into the 2020s. In 2021, he launched The Currency, a project that paired 10,000 unique dot paintings with NFTs, inviting collectors to choose between owning the physical artwork or its digital counterpart. The series interrogated notions of value and authenticity in an era of blockchain technology, although later scrutiny in 2024 questioned the originally stated creation dates of the works.

In 2024, The Light That Shines at Château La Coste in France presented nearly 90 works spanning five pavilions, revisiting and expanding on his major series. The same year, his Civilisation Paintings—dense, imaginary urban-scapes overgrown with flora—were exhibited at Phillips London, demonstrating a painterly evolution rooted in entropy and excess.

Most recently, in 2025, Hirst unveiled The Dreams, which reimagines his butterfly motifs using the dynamic, centrifugal energy of his Spin Paintings, merging themes of beauty, transience, and mechanical intervention.

To date, Hirst has held over 80 solo exhibitions globally, including The Dead and the Souls (2011) at Gow Langsford Gallery. His first major retrospective, The Agony and the Ecstasy, was staged in 2004 at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. He received the Turner Prize in 1995 and remains one of the most influential and controversial figures in contemporary art. His work continues to provoke debate, reaffirming its place at the intersection of spectacle, theory, and the sublime.