Damien Hirst was born in Bristol. England in 1965.
While still a student at Goldsmith's College in 1988, he curated the now
renowned student exhibition, Freeze, held in east London. In this
exhibition, Hirst brought together a group of young artists who would come to
define cutting-edge contemporary art in the 1990s. In 1991, he had his first
solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery, entitled ‘In and Out of Love’,
in which he filled the gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies, some
of which were hatched from the monochrome canvases that hung the walls. In
1992, he was part of the ground-breaking Young British Artists exhibition at
the Saatchi Gallery. In this show, he exhibited his now famous ‘Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’, a tiger shark in a glass
tank of formaldehyde. That same year he was nominated for the prestigious Tate
Gallery Turner Prize, and later won that coveted award in 1995.
Hirst's best-known works are his paintings, medicine cabinet
sculptures, and glass tank installations. For the most part, his paintings have
taken on two styles. One is an arrangement of colour spots with titles that
refer to pharmaceutical chemicals, known as ‘Spot’ paintings. The second, his ‘Spin’
paintings, are created by centrifugal force, when Hirst places his canvases on
a spinner, and pours the paint as they spin. In the medicine cabinet pieces,
Hirst redefines sculpture with his arrangements of various drugs, surgical
tools, and medical supplies. His tank pieces, which contain dead animals, that
are preserved in formaldehyde, are another kind of sculpture and directly
address the inevitable mortality of all living beings. All of Hirst's works
contain his ironic wit, and question art's role in contemporary culture.
Hirst's first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery, entitled 'No Sense of Absolute Corruption', was in 1996 at
the now-closed SoHo location in New York. 'Superstition' was Damien Hirst's first show at the Beverley Hills space.
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