Damien Hirst
The shark in formaldehyde.
Damien Hirst exhibited a tiger shark in formaldehyde and a skull covered in diamonds. He led the Young British Artists.
Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. He studied at Goldsmiths College in London from 1986 to 1989. While still a student, in 1988, he organised the exhibition Freeze in an empty warehouse in London's Docklands, with works by himself and fellow students. The exhibition is usually regarded as the starting point of the Young British Artists, and the advertising executive and collector Charles Saatchi soon became their most important buyer.
Hirst's breakthrough was The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living of 1991, a four-metre tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde. It was financed by Saatchi. Over time the shark began to rot and was replaced in 2006. Later works include Mother and Child (Divided), a cow and a calf cut in half in formaldehyde, shown at the Venice Biennale in 1993. In 1995 he won the Turner Prize.
Death is his great theme, but so are medicine, science and faith. He has made cabinets filled with pharmaceutical packaging, an entire pharmacy, and pictures made of dead butterflies. His spot paintings, with rows of coloured circles, and his spin paintings were largely made by assistants, something he openly acknowledges. In 2007 he showed For the Love of God, a platinum cast of a human skull covered with 8,601 diamonds.
Hirst is also a businessman. In September 2008 he sold more than 200 new works directly at auction at Sotheby's, bypassing a gallery, for a total of just over £111 million. The auction took place on the same day that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. He has since undertaken large projects such as the invented shipwreck-treasure exhibition in Venice in 2017 and an NFT project based on spot paintings.
Hirst is one of the world's richest artists and one of the most controversial. For some he is one of the great artists of his time, forcing us to look death in the eye. For others he stands for an art world in which spectacle and money have taken over. He has also been accused of borrowing other people's ideas. No one, however, denies his importance for British art since 1990.