Damien Steven Hirst

(1965 - today)

 

English artist, curator, art collector and entrepreneur. One of the 'Young British Artists' who dominated the UK art scene during the 1990s, and became the UKs richest living artist, estimated at $384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List.

 

Born in Bristol (1965), he grew up in Leeds with his mother and stepfather. His parents divorced when he was 12. A wild adolescent, he spent part of his youth in trouble with the police; and part of it obsessed with death and decay, and drawing corpses at an anatomy school in Leeds. After graduating high school, he moved to London to make his way in the art world.

 

Finding himself rejected by several art schools, he spent two years working on construction sites before he was accepted at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1986. At Goldsmiths, students were given studio space, sessions with tutors and instructions in how to treat art as a potentially lucrative business.

 

"...as soon as I arrived at Goldsmiths I knew it was where I needed to be. It was absolutely the right place; there was nowhere else I could have gone where I could have done what I wanted to do.”

 

During this period, he both curated and debuted his work in a group exhibition called 'Freeze'. He and his fellow students became known as the 'Young British Artists' (YBAs): a prolific jumble of creatives who often exhibited together, without help from the art establishment, and were famed for their edgy artistic styles and unique use of materials. Within the Freeze collection were some of Hirst's first globally-recognised Spot paintings which he painted directly on the wall of the exhibition space in London's Docklands.

 

As the world entered the 1990s, Hirst's career skyrocketed and he was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize in 1995. He developed a close working relationship with Charles Saatchi, the well-known publicist tycoon and collector, after Saatchi viewed his grotesque A Thousand Years piece which featured hundreds of maggots eating a dead cow's head. Saatchi immediately saw promise in Hirst's provocative and often absurd art, providing him with support and finance until the early 2000s.

 

Merging art with science, his Natural History series is infamous for its use of taxidermied animals, from farm species like cows and sheep to more exotic creatures such as sharks and zebras, preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in large tanks. Gazing at bisected, flayed and sometimes rotting flesh provokes both a sense of horror and intrigue. As Hirst explained at interview: "What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect."

 

"I deal in death in art, not in life, if you really

think about death, it makes you inactive."

 

He's set numerous records including: attracting the second highest number of visitors to a monographic exhibition in the history of Tate, behind Matisse Piccasso; setting a world record for the largest amount raised by any living artist at a solo auction £111 million ($198 million); encrusting a skull with 8,601 flawless diamonds; setting his own record for the sale of a single work at £16.6 million ($19.2 million) for Lullaby Spring. He's designed the cover of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers album I'm With You. His representation of the British Union flag formed the arena centrepiece for the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony in London. He's now the owner of his first art gallery, Newport Street Gallery, in South London.

 

Hirst has been pushing the boundaries of the art industry for his entire careers and regardless of appropriation and plagiarism claims, he is showing no signs of slowing down. Hirst is now painting trees in bloom. "It took me up to 55 to please my mother." His next exhibition will be his first NFT collection The Currency, at Newport Street Gallery in London on Friday, 23 September 2022, during which time original artworks will be burned in the gallery. And so his career continues...

 

To date, Hirst has turned down the chance of election to the Royal Academy and refused the offer of a CBE.