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.

Since the mid-1990s Hirst has been working in an abstract mode, pouring paint on rotating canvases attached to a spin machine he had installed in his studio. You threw a melon at my head belongs to the 2002 portfolio of twenty-three etchings titled “In a Spin: The Action of the World on Things, Volume I” - Hirst’s first attempt to transform his concept of spin drawings and paintings into the print medium. For this series of etchings, he attached copperplates to the machine and drew on them as they spun with needles, screwdrivers, and other sharp tools, in a performance-like ritual that lasted for several days.

“In a Spin: The Action of the World on Things, Volume I" represent the series where Hirst took the etching medium to its limits: in order to create the spin sketches, the etching copper plates had to be fixed to the spin machine which then rotated at high speeds, forcing the sharp scratching tool to perform random movements.

Wheel within a Wheel is one of the twenty-three etchings that comprise the first volume of two portfolios, In a Spin, the Action of the World on Things I and II. Each etching was made by the artist in London 2002, printed on 350gsm Hahnemuhle paper, proofed and editioned at Hope (Sufferance) Press, London and published by Charles Booth-Clibborn under his imprint, The Paragon Press.
The print' concentric-circle format, and the portfolio's title, were inspired by a long-exposure photograph Hirst had taken of the night sky, showing the stars arranged in an abstract pattern.

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“ I need to communicate the here and now. I realized that you couldn't use the tools of yesterday to communicate today's world. „

—Damien Hirst