Celebrated contemporary Damien Hirst with a zebra in formaldehyde, a piece he titled ‘The Incredible Journey’
British artist Damien Hirst made a name for himself as an enfant terrible of the Young British Artists. His works are often focused on death and the confrontation of mortality, and they overwhelmingly involve animal corpses or memento mori as their central features.
Hirst is a polarising figure in today’s art world, with some finding his creations repulsive and pretentious, and others believing he is a boundary-pushing genius. Despite this, Hirst’s popularity is undeniable; he is among the richest artists alive today, and his work consistently fetches huge sums at auction, with his prints typically fetching between £1,000 and £5,000.
Damien Hirst’s fame is partly a result of his outlandish and deliberately provocative behaviour. Since his own eccentric personality played a part in conferring celebrity status on him, it is useful to know some things about his life when considering his art. Below are seven things you might not have known about Damien Hirst.
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He Spearheaded The Young British Artists
The Young British Artists (or YBAs) is a loose group of artists famed for their wild lifestyles and shock tactics. They include Gillian Wearing, Angus Fairhurst, and Tracey Emin, and the group is generally considered to have formed after the Freeze student exhibition of 1988, which was predominantly organised by Damien Hirst.
Freeze took place in a derelict London building, and it gained a surprising amount of coverage for a student show. It even caught the attention of the famed collector and businessman, Charles Saatchi. Saatchi remained a keen supporter and sponsor of the YBAs – and of Hirst in particular – for a number of years, and he was in many ways fundamental to their success in the art world.
His Most Expensive Prints Sold For £120,000
Damien Hirst released The Virtues in 2021, and the series has soared in popularity, now accounting for eight out of ten of the artist’s most expensive prints sold at auction. There is a sense of serene beauty in The Virtues which is at odds with the usual morbidity that imbues Hirst’s work. Each of the eight cherry blossom infused images in the series is named after a different virtue of Bushidō, the moral code of the samurais, which were identified by Nitobe Inazō’s as being: Justice, Courage, Mercy, Politeness, Honesty, Honour, Loyalty, and Control.
The Virtues sold by Phillips in 2021
He Might Be The World’s Richest Living Artist
And if he isn’t, he’s certainly close to being so, fighting for the title alongside other famous artists such as Anish Kapoor, Edward Ruscha, and Jeff Koons. Hirst’s most expensive piece of artwork so far is The Golden Calf; it was sold by Sotheby’s in September 2008 for £9.2 million at the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever auction, which was exclusively for new work by Damien Hirst. The decision to bypass galleries and sell directly to the public was unusual and groundbreaking for such a well-known artist, but it certainly paid off for Hirst; 218 items were sold over the two-day auction, raising £111 million in total.
He’s Highly Controversial
Given Hirst’s work, it’s hardly surprising that he’s a divisive figure in today’s art world. He’s been extensively criticised by animal rights campaigners, he’s been accused of mislabelling some pieces so they seem older than they actually are, and questions have been raised about his factory-style studio, in which his assistants do most of the physical work. Hirst even admitted that he barely created a single one of his ‘spot paintings’ because he “couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it.”
Aside from the ethics of his practice, one of the main accusations critics level at Hirst is that he has no real artistic skill, and that his pieces are based more on shock value and clever marketing than anything else. The respected art critic Robert Huges remarked his “skill at manipulation is his real success as an artist”, calling his art “both simple-minded and sensationalist”. Many others differ in this view, though, including the art historian Rudi Fuchs, who wrote that Hirst’s work can “uncannily touch the nerve of our time.”
The artist’s own words make his feelings on the matter clear: “As an artist, the best you can hope for is people arguing. Love it and hate it. If you get that, then you’re on the right track. If everyone loves it or everyone hates it, you’re in trouble.”
Damien Hirst Spot Paintings
He Worked At A Mortuary
Whilst he was a student, Damien Hirst took a placement at a mortuary. His exact reasons for doing so are unclear, but one thing is obvious: the experience continues to affect his creations to this day. Hirst’s work is overwhelmingly concerned with death and the fleeting nature of life, and the artist often explores this concept using dead, dissected, rotting animals or skulls. Many view this as morbid, but it’s proved hugely popular; for instance, Hirst’s 2009 print of multi-coloured human skulls titled The Dead was sold for £82,000 in September 2018.
He Often Uses Butterflies In His Work
Hirst’s morbid fascination also extends to butterflies; he regularly cuts off their wings and incorporates them into his paintings. Questions have been raised many times about how ethical Hirst’s treatment of butterflies is, especially after his 1991 exhibition In and Out of Love, which included real butterflies breeding, living, and dying in a closed, artificially-lit gallery space.
Hirst replicated this installation in a retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2012, and he was widely condemned for the deaths of over 9,000 butterflies during the exhibition. Despite this, his kaleidoscopic butterfly wing prints are enormously popular; the Cathedral series was sold for £120,000, The Aspects fetched £75,000, and Mantra reached £70,000.
Damien Hirst – In and Out of Love
He Is An Avid Art Collector
Damien Hirst has a huge range of artwork by other artists, some of whom are well-known, and some of whom are still establishing their reputations. In 2006, he showed a small part of his collection to the public for the first time in an exhibition he curated at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Since then, he has opened the Newport Street Gallery to consistently show pieces from his collection, including art by Banksy, John Copeland, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Gillian Carnegie, Franz Kline, Francis Bacon, Sarah Lucas, Wes Lang, and Tracey Emin.
