DAMIEN HIRST (Bristol, United Kingdom, 1965).
"Fruitful (Small)", 2020.
Giclée print laminated on aluminium composite panel. Edition 1789/3308.
In collaboration with Fondazione Prada.
Heni Editions. Catalogue number H8-2.
With label on the back.
Sizes: 39 x 39 cm.
Damien Hirst's Fruitful series becomes a true ode to colour. Launched alongside the "Forever" series in September 2020, the initiative was organised in collaboration with Fondazione Prada in support of Save the Children. In it, the dense, layered patches of paint on his large-scale canvases from the "Cherry Blossom" series (depicting trees in full bloom) demonstrate the influence of colour on the viewer's emotions.
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol on 7 June 1965, in a financially troubled suburban environment. He never knew his biological father and his mother married a car salesman, who left them when Hirst was 13. His mother, an amateur artist and devout Christian, took care of him, but because of his father's abandonment he had to educate himself from the bottom up, which is perhaps the main reason why Damien Hirst argues that art is classless. He trained at the University of Leed while combining his studies with a job at the local mortuary, which he later left to move to London. During this time he was working in construction while also applying to various art schools such as St Martins and the Welsh College. He was eventually accepted at Golsdmiths College, which, at the time, due to the economic recession in England, was a school that attracted bright students and creative tutors. While studying, Hirst financed his expenses by working on telephone surveys, a direct cause of his ability to fake any emotion over the phone. During his studies he also worked at McDonald's, and part-time at the Anthony D'Ofray gallery, where he learned the mechanics of the art market. Already in his second year, Hirst took on the role of artist and curator, and managed to stage an exhibition that would change the course of British art, his first solo exhibition at the age of 26. Four years later, in 1995, he won his second Turner Prize nomination for Mother and Child. At the age of 32, the Larry Gagosian Gallery offered him a major retrospective, after which he declared that he had run out of places to exhibit, he had done it all and too quickly. As a result, he was soon dubbed Hooligan Genius by the media. Although he became a millionaire at the age of 40, Hirst's hypersensitivity became suspect, wrapped in an aura of romanticism he made revolutionising the art world look easy". Damien Hirst has works in the MoMA in New York, the Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Palazzo Gras in Venice, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Germany), the Hirshhorn in Washington D.C. and the Neu Galerie in Graz (Austria), among other important public and private collections.