Damien Hirst
DAMIEN HIRST (Bristol, 1965) is one of today’s most controversial artists. He began his art career as a member of the highly influential art group Young British Artists, gained worldwide fame and recognition in the 90s and dominated the art scene in the UK and the world during the 1990s. Death is a central theme in Hirst’s work and many of his artworks examine the relationship between life, death, love and religion. He became famous for the series of artworks Natural History in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved, sometimes dissected, in formaldehyde. The best known is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 4.3m tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine. Hirst is the UK’s richest living artist having sold Spring Lullaby for nearly $23 million and his show Beautiful Inside My Head Forever completely selling out and raising $198 million. As a teenager, young Damien enjoyed reading textbooks on pathology and looking at pictures of sick, defective, and injured tissues and organs. This frightened his mother, who considered him a morbid child.
