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.

Hirst first experimented with spin art in 1992 at his studio in Brixton, London. The following year, he set up a spin art stall with fellow artist Angus Fairhurst at Joshua Compston’s artist led street fair, ‘A Féte Worse than Death’.

The spin paintings are characterised by the works’ elongated titles, which begin with ‘Beautiful’ and end in ‘painting’, and their bright colours. Whilst the chance spontaneity of the spin paintings stands in stark contrast to the formulaic spot series, both explore the idea of an imaginary mechanical painter. The results of the spins are controlled purely by the artist’s colour choices and the motion of the machine.

"﻿Spinning Stars" is ﻿one of the 16 motifs of the portfolio "In a spin, the action of the world on things, Volume II" published in 2002 by The Paragon Press, London.

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“ I really like making them. And I really like the machine, and I really like the movement. Every time they’re finished, I’m desperate to do another one. „

—Damien Hirst