The Turner prize winner and epicenter of the YBA movement. Hirst's emblematic art of our era revolutionizes the art market. Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today, creating truly iconic artworks.

A genuine star of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, Damien Hirst has always made a point of mixing up different media. Whether as a sculptor, an installation artist, a painter, or a printmaker, Hirst has produced many of the most spectacular and widely discussed works in recent years and helped to revolutionize the art market. Damien Hirst’s, For the Love of God, the diamond-encrusted replica of the skull of a thirty-five-year-old man from the thirteenth century, broke all records to become the most expensive contemporary artwork in the world. Damien Hirst´s artworks are truly emblematic icons of our era, with their recurring motives such as dots, butterflies, cows, sharks, skulls, pills, and pharmacy cabinets. His works, captivating and intense as they are, challenge our stereotyped concepts and beliefs. Damien Hirst’s shark, suspended in formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), is widely recognized, as are his real butterflies suspended in paint or thousands of butterfly wings arranged in a mandala-like pattern – the famous Damien Hirst butterfly paintings. Since 1986 he has been producing the Spot paintings (sometimes called Dot Paintings), a series of paintings with evocative pharmacological titles, which display lines of colored spots. Damien Hirst´s Spot paintings and his Spin paintings became iconic series. Inspired by such diverse themes as life, death, art, science, and medicine, Damien Hirst’s art takes a direct and challenging approach to ideas about existence. The energy and inventiveness are also to be found in Damien Hirst's prints, which continue to stir controversy within the viewer with the same intensity.

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst, a poster boy for the Young British Artists who rose to prominence in late 1980s London, is one of the most notorious artists of his generation.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Damien_Hirst_Butterfly_Rainbow_Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2023.pdf

Shortly after graduating from Goldsmiths, in 1989, Hirst began working on a series of paintings after seeing flies get stuck on primed canvases in his Brixton studio. Taking this idea, but wanting to create something beautiful, Hirst started fixing the bodies of dead butterflies to monochrome gloss-painted canvases. The appeal of butterflies is created largely by the appearance of life they retain in death. Hirst has said, “I think rather than be personal you have to find universal triggers: everyone’s frightened of glass, everyone’s frightened of sharks, everyone loves butterflies.”

"A symbol of hope" as Hirst has expressed throughout his career, the rainbow has been vastly used throughout the history of art - spanning more than 800 years. One of that most enigmatic weather phenomena, the rainbow: from Noah's sign and the Book of Revelation, through to 18th-century optics, the epic landscapes of Romanticism, and modernist abstraction.

"I love colour. How can you not?" has said Hirst. Another way that rainbows provide us with hope and motivation is by being a symbol for good luck. Rainbows are often thought to bring good fortune.

Show all results