Damien Hirst

Artist

Damien Hirst is a controversial figure, and one of the leading, and most famous, artists of his generation. He shot to fame in 1988 with his Freeze exhibition whilst he was still a student at Goldsmiths College in London. Until recently he was perhaps best known for his ‘tank pieces’ – dead animals displayed in glass cases (vitrines) and preserved in formaldehyde (the Natural History series). His first solo exhibition, In and out of love, opened at the Woodstock Street Gallery. In this exhibition he filled the gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies.

In 1992 Hirst was part of the Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi gallery. Throughout the 1990s, he continued to produce additions to his Natural History series, creating works such as Mother and Child Divided (1993) – a dissected cow and calf displayed in a series of vitrines – and Away From the Flock (1994) – a dead sheep preserved in formaldehyde. More recently, Hirst opened his Beyond Belief exhibition in 2007. The centrepiece for this was his For The Love of God – a platinum human skull studded with over 8,000 diamonds. In 2008, Hirst held a two-day auction of his new work at Sotheby’s, where the 218 pieces auctioned raised £111 million. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995 and the DAD Fellowship in Berlin in 1994.

Outside of his art career Hirst has dabbled in music - he was a member of the band Fat Les (formed with Keith Allen and Blur’s Alex James), whose 1998 single Vindaloo reached number 2 in the UK charts.