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MIAMI |
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HIRST Damien
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965. While still a student at
Goldsmith's College in 1988, he curated the now renowned student exhibition,
Freeze, held in east London. In this exhibition, Hirst brought together a
group of young artists who would come to define cutting-edge contemporary
art in the 1990s.
In 1991, he had his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock
Street Gallery, entitled In and Out of Love, in which he filled the gallery
with hundreds of live tropical butterflies, some of which were hatched from
the monochrome canvases that hung the walls. In 1992, he was part of the
ground breaking Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. In
this show, he exhibited his now famous Physical Impossibility of Death in
the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde.
That same year he was nominated for the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner
Prize, and later won that coveted award in 1995.
Hirst's best known works are his paintings, medicine cabinet sculptures, and
glass tank installations. For the most part, his paintings have taken on two
styles. One is an arrangement of color spots with titles that refer to
pharmaceutical chemicals, known as Spot paintings. The second, his Spin
paintings, are created by centrifugal force, when Hirst places his canvases
on a spinner, and pours the paint as they spin. In the medicine cabinet
pieces Hirst redefines sculpture with his arrangements of various drugs,
surgical tools, and medical supplies. His tank pieces, which contain dead
animals, that are preserved in formaldehyde, are another kind of sculpture
and directly address the inevitable mortality of all living beings. All of
Hirst's works contain his ironic wit, and question art's role in
contemporary culture.
Hirst's first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery, entitled No Sense of
Absolute Corruption, was in 1996 at the now-closed SoHo location in New
York. Superstition is Damien Hirst's first show at the Beverly Hills space.
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