Damien Hirst: Biography & Artwork

Damien
Hirst

Emerging at the forefront of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement in the late 80s, Damien Hirst remains an audacious contemporary provocateur. Preoccupied with death, Hirst practises across a range of media but is famed for his large-scale, often controversially explicit, installations and use of unlikely materials.

Biography

British artist Damien Hirst is widely hailed as the enfant terrible of the contemporary art world. Hirst is one of the most prominent figures in the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, an internationally-renowned artist group known for their controversial work and dominance of the British art scene during the 1990s. A contemporary of well-known YBAs like Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst and Jenny Saville, Hirst is not shy to scandalise and shock the world with his art pieces.

Obsessed with the themes of life and death, it comes as no surprise that they have become a central motif in all of Hirst’s works. From his seemingly innocuous spot paintings to his controversial art installations involving animal carcasses, Hirst’s artworks are weighted with meaning and symbolism. A trailblazer and rule-breaker, Hirst is unafraid of showing his uniqueness through his pieces.

Hirst’s preoccupation with death and mortality is encapsulated in his 1992 art installation Pharmacy. A clean, minimalistic recreation of an actual pharmacy with white shelves stocked with medicines, the installation combines both life and death in a seamless manner. Hirst’s 2007 sculpture For the Love of God also exemplifies his flair for the morbid and unconventional, initially recognised in his Turner Prize win in 1995. The work involves the recreation of an 18th-century human skull, covered in 8601 diamonds, with a large pear-shaped diamond attached to it's forehead. Costing Hirst and his team £12 million to produce, the work was sold for £50 million to an anonymous consortium.

Another of Hirst’s works that sent shockwaves throughout the art world and beyond, was his 1991 installation The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. This work encased a 14-foot tiger shark in a large tank filled with formaldehyde. Costing Hirst £50,000 to execute, this installation captures a moment between life and death. The work was eventually sold in 2004 to Steven A. Cohen for an unnamed amount.

Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon, a friend of Hirst’s and a major supporter of his work, has been a key influence on the artist’s practice. Hirst’s morbid fascination with gore and death, explored in the screen print series Til Death Do Us Part (2012), evokes Bacon’s controversial treatment of the body in his visceral figurative paintings.
Works such as For The Love Of God recall Marcel Duchamp’s use of everyday objects to create works he dubbed ‘readymades’, a practice echoed by another of Hirst’s friends and contemporaries, Jeff Koons. The reproducibility of Hirst’s works, many of which are created by a team of assistants, are certainly inspired by the artistic practice and philosophy of American Pop Artist, Andy Warhol. Hirst cites little-known British artist John Hoyland as the catalyst for his long fascination with colour, characteristic of his Spot paintings.
Damien Hirst is no stranger to controversy. Well-known for his provocative and inflammatory works that deal explicitly with taboos such as death, Hirst has also been criticised for creating art which is both cruel and possibly dangerous. In a major retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery in 2012, Hirst recreated one of his 1991 installations, In And Out Of Love (White Paintings And Live Butterflies) (1991). Featuring a host of live butterflies, over 9000 were said to have died during the exhibition’s five month-long run. Hirst’s famous installation Two Fucking And Two Watching – made from a rotting cow and bull – was once banned from appearing at a New York exhibition for fear it would induce illness and vomiting amongst visitors.
After producing his first limited-edition print series, The Last Supper, in 1999, Damien Hirst has created numerous prints and editions that have dominated the market - with many selling for over 6 figures at Auction.
It is Hirst’s Spot prints, however, that remain his most popular and continually successful on the secondary market. Based on Hirst’s pharmaceutical paintings, the popularity of the Spots can perhaps be put down to their visual accessibility or the fact that he signs these works on the front, rather than the back, making them all the more recognisable. Similarly, the Hirst In a Spin series and Butterfly prints remain perennial favourites, with one of his Butterfly stained-glass prints selling for £150,000 in 2018 - currently the most expensive of Hirst’s prints to sell at auction.
The number of prints and editions produced in a series obviously affects their price and success on the secondary market, with the average Hirst series spanning between 50 - 150 alongside artist proofs. One of the key exceptions to this is found in his Butterfly Rainbow and Butterfly Heart prints, made to raise money for the NHS, which was released in 2020 in editions of up to 4,150.
To read more about the Hirst print market, see our interview with specialist Henrik Riis.

Considered Hirst‘s most expensive work for its value in dollars (US$19,200,000 million), Lullaby Spring – a steel and glass cabinet holding 6,136 individually painted pills – achieved over three times its £3,000,000-4,000,000 estimate when it sold at Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction in London on 21 June 2007. At £9,600,000, it set a new auction record price for Hirst and established him as Europe’s most expensive living artist at the time.

Lullaby Spring is one in a series of four pill cabinets known as Lullaby, The Seasons. Christie’s had sold Lullaby Winter in their New York auction in May 2007 for US$7,432,000, or £3,700,000, although the buyer never paid. Just over a month later, Lullaby Spring increased the value of Hirst’s pill cabinets by US$12,000,000 when it was offered at Sotheby’s.