Damien Hirst (British, b. 1965) creates sculptural installations that preserve dead animals in formaldehyde, alongside spot, spin and butterfly paintings addressing themes of death and value.,In 1988, while a student at Goldsmiths College, he conceived and curated “Freeze”, an exhibition of his own work and that of his classmates staged in a disused London warehouse. He lives and works in London and Devon.
“Freeze” was the impetus for the loose group of artists later known as the Young British Artists.His early sculptures suspended dead animals in tanks of formaldehyde, among them The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark shown in 1991, and Mother and Child Divided, a bisected cow and calf originally shown in 1993.In and Out of Love (1991), an installation filled with live butterflies, and Pharmacy (1992), a full-scale replica pharmacy, extended this exploration of life and death into installation form.,In 2007 he unveiled For the Love of God, a platinum cast skull set with 8,601 diamonds.Tate Modern presented the first substantial UK survey of his work in 2012, bringing together more than seventy pieces spanning two decades and showing For the Love of God separately in the Turbine Hall.,
His manager Frank Dunphy, a former accountant, secured him a 70 to 90 percent share of sales at White Cube and Gagosian Gallery, up from the fifty-fifty split he had previously held with his dealers.In September 2008, on Dunphy's encouragement, Hirst bypassed both galleries to sell 223 new works directly through Sotheby's, an auction that raised £111 million in one eveningon the day Lehman Brothers collapsed.He opened Newport Street Gallery in south London in 2015, showing works from his own collection, beginning with paintings by John Hoyland.“Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable”, staged across the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2017, presented sculptures and photographs pitched as recoveries from a legendary shipwreck.
In February 2021 Hirst released The Virtues, a set of eight prints, through the Heni Leviathan platform, for a combined $22.4 million.That July he followed it with The Currency, pairing 10,000 individual paper dot paintings with matching NFTs and asking each buyer to choose between the physical work and its digital counterpart within a year.,Unclaimed physical works were destroyed in a public “Burn Event” performance, in which Hirst set the paper artworks alight and minted the process as a further series of NFTs.,
