Damien Hirst - [First Draft- NOT COMPLETED]

“If you admit to yourself what it means to be an artist, then the best way to do it is to give up making art, and put what you’ve got into other people.” [Damien Hirst]

Damien Hirst is an English artist which was born in 1965 in Bristol. He became famous with the exhibition under the title “Freeze” in 1988. After this exhibition, Charles Saatchi, the art collector, began to collect Damien’s work. He also bought Damien’s “A Thousand years”.

He did a lot of series work and those are so famous, for instance, The Natural History series in which dead animals are representing as memento mori. Their titles show the thoughts and his will and the cover. It just can't be described by words. You may even not understand, nor visualise it without experiencing it first. 

The Natural History series, the ones which animals are preserved in formaldehyde, are the most famous ones and also the most controversial ones. Between all of these formaldehyde works we can name the most amazing and probably the most famous one “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”(1991), the huge tiger shark preserved in the formaldehyde shown at the Saatchi gallery. In this art work, Damien shows the frenzy of death with the shark.

Damien also recorder many theme art works. Cigarette is one of his themes. For instance, Part Time is one of his cigarette’s theme works. In this piece he minimized the life cycle into a huge ashtray, “cigarettes shows the life, the packets shows the birth, God is showing by the lighter because he gives life to everything, and ashtray represent death and grave.

Medical paraphernalia is another theme in which he inspired by pharmacy tools and pieces. He believes that “All the medicines which are there between birth and death to keep us alive”.  

Hirst also has done many paintings inspired by pharmaceutical, deuterated compounds, and controlled substances. Probably most of you are familiar with the “spot” painting. He has done several of these accurate graded and the same sized painted dots in the different size of canvases and different arrangement of colours. He believes that “there is similar scientific approach to the life between paintings and drug companies but it doesn’t mean that art have all the answers, but drug companies do”. In these paintings applying grid structure is the beginning of the system. You can not fine the same two colours in the same painting.