Britain’s most famous living artist and enfant terrible of the YBAs, Damien Hirst, is a conceptual artist, painter, printmaker, and assemblagist. His deliberately provocative art addresses vanitas, beauty, rebirth, medicine, and technology, often shocking and invigorating public debate on contemporary art. Mastering artistic self-promotion, Hirst transformed the romantic ideal of the artist into an entrepreneurial figure of modern commerce. Alongside Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Liam Gillick, Hirst became the leading figure of the Young British Artists (YBAs). He attended Goldsmiths College in London and curated the formative Freeze show in 1988, gaining the attention of media entrepreneur and art collector Charles Saatchi, an early patron. Damien Hirst refined Marcel Duchamp’s idea of ready-made objects, presenting dead animals in formaldehyde. In 1995, he won the Turner Prize with artworks including the controversial bisected cow and calf, titled Mother and Child (Divided). His preserved shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, was the centerpiece of Saatchi’s iconic YBA exhibition, Sensation, at the Royal Academy in 1997. Beyond installations and sculptures, Hirst’s limited edition prints, such as those based on his butterfly and spot paintings, are universally recognized. Damien Hirst’s print production often involves creating works in series, emphasizing themes of repetition and variation. Major solo exhibitions of his artwork were held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (2008) and Tate Modern in London (2012). Born in 1965 in Bristol, Damien Hirst currently lives in London, United Kingdom.
