Damien Hirst

(English, b. 1965)

“There has only ever been one idea, and it’s the fear of death; art is about the fear of death.”
— Damien Hirst

British artist and wild child Damien Hirst continually pushes the limits on good taste with outrageous projects. He memorably shocked the world with artwork featuring dead animals in formaldehyde, among other questionable takes on art.

Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965. He was raised Catholic, and this religious education plays an important role in his art. Pathology books that demonstrated disease, injury, and anatomy also fascinated him. He was a contrary child with a macabre side. In his teenage years, the young artist sometimes exhibited wild and troublesome behavior, including getting caught shoplifting a few times.

He was, however, a serious student and showed skills in art. Although his youth may have been rocky, Hirst went on to study at the Goldsmith’s College at the University of London. During the summer months on break, Hirst worked at a mortuary home in Leeds. There he took the portrait, With Dead Head, 1991. He sketched cadavers there as well, foreshadowing the gore in his later work, and creating a starting point for his practice of using dead animals in works of art. In his second year at Goldsmith’s, Hirst collaborated with fellow students Fiona Rae, Sarah Lucas, and others for Freeze, an exhibition held in an old warehouse in 1988. He and the other students became associated with the Young British Artists movement, and of which Hirst remains a main figure today. The movement became popular through their unusual choice of materials and odd concepts.

Hirst’s practice explored themes of life, death, science, and religion through the 1990s. The installation A Thousand Years, 1990, presented a rotting cow’s head on the floor of a large glass display case, filled with maggots, which morphed into flies and then inevitably were electrocuted by a bug zapper over the cow’s head. Celebrated painter Francis Bacon stood in front of it for an hour. Not everybody was a fan of Hirst’s works, but, enamored with his style, art collector Charles Saatchi greatly propelled his career by financially supplementing the artist with virtually no limit. In 1991, Hirst held his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery in London. The Young British Artists show at Saatchi Gallery the following year displayed The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which presented the body of a dead shark preserved with formaldehyde, possibly stemming from his infatuation with death and disease. Loved or hated, he was one of Britain’s best-known and wealthiest artists.

First nominated for the notable Turner Prize in 1992, Hirst would win the prize in 1995 with his Mother and Child Divided, 1995, featuring a cow and calf cut into segments and displayed in a series of glass cabinets. In 1997, his autobiography and art book, I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, was published. Contrasting his animal carcasses, Hirst also does various recurring series - including butterfly arrangements, spin paintings, spot paintings and pharmacy displays featuring medicine cabinets and medical paraphernalia. Though different in content, they use the same minimalist display aesthetic as his Natural History works.

In 2008, Hirst skipped the galleries to auction his work directly to the public. The auction, called Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, was held at Sotheby's in London and brought in roughly $198 million. Hirst has also offered prints and other items bearing some of his signature styles and images through his company, Other Criteria, with success. Besides being a successful artist, Hirst has proved himself a successful businessman as well. Similar to Jasper Johns and Jeff Koons in his ability to command huge prices for his works, he has become one of the wealthiest living artists today. In 2011, he produced his own skateboard line. He also opened the series of Pharmacy restaurants, has been producing films and books, and making music with the band Fat Les. Hirst continues to create pieces based on controversial subjects, contributing to the ever-expanding world of art.

Between 1992 and 2012, Hirst lived with his Californian girlfriend, Maia Norman, with whom he has three sons. Hirst partied hard with his fellow YBA contemporaries and his lifestyle was as wild as his work, with him admitting serious drug and alcohol problems during a ten-year period from the early 1990s when he would be extremely uninhabited and bizarre. In 2002, Hirst gave up smoking and drinking after his wife Maia "had to move out because [he] was so horrible". After some dating around, the artist became engaged to younger ballerina Sophie Cannell as of 2019. Hirst is a supporter of the indigenous rights organization, Survival International, which explores the existence of and threats to indigenous cultures around the world. In 2016, he donated several artworks to charity, supporting the fight against Hepatitis C. Hirst is as celebrated as he is a mysterious figure in the artworld.

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