Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol on 7 June 1965 and grew up in Leeds. He studied at Goldsmiths College in London, where in 1988, still an undergraduate, he organised Freeze, an exhibition staged in a disused London Port Authority building with work by sixteen of his fellow students.

 Freeze is generally taken as the starting point of the group that became known as the Young British Artists, and it established a pattern Hirst has followed since: the artist as organiser and producer as much as maker.

The work has proceeded in long, named series rather than single directions, several of them running in parallel for decades. The Natural History works, begun in 1991, suspend animals in formaldehyde in steel and glass vitrines, among them The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a fourteen-foot tiger shark.

 The Spot Paintings, begun in 1986 and eventually numbering more than a thousand, arrange evenly spaced coloured dots on white grounds under a rule that no colour repeats. The Medicine Cabinets and Pharmaceutical Paintings present pharmacy packaging and pill forms with the reverence usually given to relics. The Butterfly Paintings set real wings into gloss and household paint in patterns borrowed from stained glass.

Across all of it the subject is remarkably stable: death, and the systems people build to keep it at a distance. Medicine, religion, taxidermy, entomology and the art market itself appear as parallel technologies of reassurance — each promising permanence, each visibly failing.

 The vitrine is the recurring device, a structure that lets the viewer look at something they would otherwise avoid while keeping it sealed away. For the Love of God, a platinum cast of a human skull set with 8,601 diamonds, made the argument at its most literal in 2007.

Hirst has also worked deliberately at the scale of spectacle. Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, shown across the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2017, presented an elaborate invented salvage — coral-encrusted bronzes and marbles recovered from a shipwreck that never existed — sustained across two buildings and several years of production, as a study in how objects acquire authority through the story attached to them.

He won the Turner Prize in 1995 and took the Grand Prize at the International Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana in 2001. His work was the subject of a full retrospective at Tate Modern in 2012, and of Cherry Blossoms at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris in 2021. Earlier institutional presentations include The Agony and the Ecstasy at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples in 2004, For the Love of God at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 2010, and The Last Supper at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2016.

His work is held in some forty public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, which holds more than fifty works, Tate, which holds more than fifty, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Stedelijk Museum, the Fondazione Prada and the Astrup Fearnley Museet.

SELECTED CV

Born 7 June 1965, Bristol, United Kingdom

Lives and works in the United Kingdom

Education and Training

1989 BA, Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, United Kingdom

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2021 Emergency Paintings, Danger Paintings, Hazard Pictures, and Seizures, Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, United Kingdom

2021 Forgiving and Forgetting, Gagosian, Rome, Italy

2021 Cathedrals Built on Sand, Gagosian, Paris, France

2012 The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011, Gagosian, worldwide

2007 Superstition, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, CA, and Davies Street, London, United Kingdom

Selected Group Exhibitions

1988 Freeze, Surrey Docks, London, United Kingdom

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2021 Cherry Blossoms (solo), Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France

2017 Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (solo), Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy

2016 The Last Supper (solo), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA

2014 Stranger than Fiction: Art of Our Time, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

2012 Damien Hirst: A Retrospective (solo), Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom

2012 Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA

2012 Print/Out, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

2010 For the Love of God (solo), Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy

2008 Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

2008 Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

2007 The Turner Prize: A Retrospective, Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom

2006 Eye on Europe: Prints, Books and Multiples, 1960 to Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

2006 Into Me / Out of Me, P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, USA

2005 Contemporary Voices: Works from The UBS Art Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

2004 The Agony and the Ecstasy (solo), Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy

2004 Artists & Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

2001 Century City, Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom

1997 Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom

Awards, Honours and Residencies

2013 Designed the BRIT Award trophy, United Kingdom

2005 Beaux Arts Magazine Art Award, Best Publication, France

2001 Grand Prize, 24th International Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia

1995 Turner Prize, Tate, London, United Kingdom

Selected Public and Institutional Collections

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

Tate, London, United Kingdom

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, USA

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy

Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway