Museum MADRE - Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst

Bristol 1965

In a way I quite like that, bringing it right back round again. [...] In a way, they are clichés. But clichés are only clichés because they’re f**king good. [...] I’m looking for connections, juxtapositions. [...] It’s like a trigger that makes you think, why is that? Or it just makes you feel a part of everything. [...] There are no answers, only questions, and hopefully the questions will help guide you through the darkness. ( From the interview with D. Hirst by Sean O’Hagan, London, May 2006)

Born in Bristol on June 7, 1965, and grew up in Leeds. Studied at the Leeds College of Art and Design, and then attended the Goldsmiths College in London (1986-89). In 1988 he was the principal organizer of an independent students’ exhibition, Freeze, for which he obtained the sponsorship of the London Docklands Development Corporation. Among visitors to the exhibition was Charles Saatchi, who at a third show organized by the artist together with Carl Freedman in 1990 purchased A Thousand Years: a big glass case containing a severed cow’s head covered with worms and flies. This work was displayed in 1997 at the group exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy in London and caused a public outcry. In 1992 Saatchi himself financed The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark in formaldehyde, which the artist displayed in his first collective show of the Young British Art at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Notwithstanding sensationalism and the search for provocation, Hirst’s works face fundamental questions regarding the meaning of life and the fragility of existence, which in 1993 led to their presentation at the 45th Venice Biennale (Mother and Child Divided) and in 1995 to win the prestigious Turner Price. In 1996 the Gagosian Gallery in New York organized his first personal exhibition, No Sense of Absolute Corruption. After directing the video clip of the song Country House by Blurs (1995), in 1997 Hirst was director and writer of the short Hanging Around, performed by Eddie Izzard. The following year he published his autobiography, I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now (Booth-Clibborn editions, London 1997). He declined the invitation of the British Council to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1999, sued British Airways over copyright in an advertising campaign, where some images taken from his Spot Painting appear. Other picture series by Hirst are: Butterfly Paintings, consisting of real butterflies suspended among colors or arranged to form patterns like mandalas (Amazing Revelations, 2003); the Spin Paintings made by rotating machines spurting colors directly onto surfaces; and more recently Fact Paintings, the artist’s experiments in photo-realism. The retrospective organized by the Saatchi Gallery in 2003 caused a break with the artist, who dissociated himself from the initiative and some months later responded with a personal exhibition, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, at Jay Jopling’s White Cube Gallery in London, where he presented his new work, Charity: a giant toy sculpture representing a baby girl with a wooden leg, displayed at the centre of Hoxton Square. Death, which remains the central theme of his research, inspires the latest work conceived by the artist: a real human skull covered with diamonds for a total cost of £4 million. This work was displayed in 2007 at the White Cube. He lives and works in London.