ArtistBritishb.1965
Damien Hirst
1 active items
Born in Bristol in 1965 and raised in Leeds, Damien Hirst grew up making regular visits to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School, sketching cadavers and developing an obsession with mortality that has shaped every body of work since. After failing his first application to Goldsmiths, University of London, he spent time working construction in London before being accepted in 1986. Three years later, still a student, he organised Freeze in a disused Port of London Authority building in Surrey Docks - a show that introduced most of what would become the Young British Artists to the London art world and, through the attention of collector Charles Saatchi, to the world beyond.
Hirst's early signature was the Natural History series: wild animals - a shark, a sheep, a cow and calf - preserved in formaldehyde inside steel and glass vitrines. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), the tiger shark commissioned by Saatchi for £50,000, became the defining object of 1990s British art. Mother and Child Divided, four tanks holding a bisected cow and calf, won him the Turner Prize in 1995. These works frame death as spectacle - something to be observed, contemplated, and ultimately failed to be resolved.
Running alongside the Natural History series were the Spot Paintings, grids of uniform coloured circles named after pharmaceutical compounds. Begun in 1988, the series eventually numbered over a thousand works and became among the most reproduced images in contemporary art, while also drawing sustained criticism for the degree to which they were executed by studio assistants rather than Hirst himself. His Spin Paintings, made by pouring paint onto a rotating canvas, occupied a similar territory: process-led, reproducible, and deliberately removed from traditional conceptions of artistic authorship.
In 2007 Hirst unveiled For the Love of God, a platinum cast of a human skull set with 8,601 diamonds and a pink diamond at the forehead, originally listed at £50 million - at the time the highest asking price ever for a work by a living artist. The following year he staged Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, a two-day sale at Sotheby's London in which 218 new works sold directly to buyers for a combined £111 million, bypassing galleries entirely and occurring on the same day Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. The sale has since become shorthand for the excess of the pre-financial-crisis art market.
At auction, Hirst's works appear with regularity at international houses and increasingly at Nordic venues. On Auctionist, 31 lots have been catalogued, with 5 currently active, handled primarily through Phillips, Lyon & Turnbull, Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Norway, Bruun Rasmussen in Denmark, and Stockholms Auktionsverk. The top recorded sale in our database is a print from The Soul on Jacob's Ladder (New Religion) series at 107,000 NOK, with pharmaceutical-themed prints and spot works making up the majority of lots. Paintings and prints account for the bulk of items, with the occasional drawing or sculpture appearing in the mix.