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.

Damien Hirst has been focussing on developing his passion for colour in the iconic Spot Paintings series since 1986. These paintings and prints are created from lines of coloured spots that repeat the same pattern: spots of every different shade are mathematically aligned, their diameter equal to the distance between each spot. Resembling candy sweets, round as a pill, the repetitive motif can prove disturbing; a feeling enhanced by the scientific titles.

Existing in the majority of cultures, Hirst has used this basic geometric form as the focus of his work to infinite variation: from very tiny (1 millimeter: 1x1/2 inch) to enormous (1m 50: 60 inches), from a single dot to a multitude (some as many as 25 781 spots, with no repetition of colour). Lanatoside is the name for a poisonous crystalline cardiac steroid glycosides occurring in the leaves of a foxglove (Digitalis lanata).

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“ Art is always very simple, or good art is always very simple. „

—Damien Hirst