Home > Shop > Laszlo

Damien Hirst

Damien Steven Hirst (born 7 June 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s.

He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended. Between 1988 and 1990 he curated a series of exhibitions of work by his contemporaries including the highly acclaimed group shows Freeze, Modern Medicine and Gambler. Death is a central theme in Hirst's works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. The best known of these being The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine (clear display case). He has also made "spin paintings," created on a spinning circular surface, and "spot paintings", which are rows of randomly coloured circles created by his assistants

Damien Hirst has created installations, sculptures, and paintings which examine the relationships between science and religion, life and death, art and beauty. His work challenges contemporary belief systems. His latest series, Cherry Blossoms, is a continuation of his investigation into traditional subjects in painting and artistic movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Impressionism and Action Painting.

In 2015 Hirst opened the Newport Street Gallery in London, a realisation of his long-term ambition to share his art collection with the public.