DAMIEN HIRST (Bristol 1965)
"Shark", 2009
Acrylic on paper (Spin painting).
Signed on the back with the artist's wet stamp and HIRST embossed stamp.
Size: 52 x 68.5 cm.
Collaborative work, made on 24 April 2009, on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition "Requiem" at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev in 2009, from 25 April to 20 September 2009. One of Damien Hirst's most famous works, created in 1991, is "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of a Living Being", in which the body of a shark floats in a hermetically sealed pond. It was from then on that he began to introduce the figure of the shark into his production, in such a way that he materialised the idea, using the silhouette of a shark and endowing its interior with a rich abstract colouring. Among other works, Damien Hirst is known artistically for his "spin paintings", such as the one shown here, which are paintings made on a rotating circular surface.
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol on 7 June 1965, in a suburban environment with economic problems. 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 has no class. 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 there was nowhere left for him 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. On several occasions he has acknowledged his desire to be famous, and in the face of criticism he has defended himself with phrases such as "they couldn't admit to themselves that they wanted to be famous and resented not being famous" or "I think my desire was to be more famous than rich, I think the desire to create art and be famous is like the desire to live forever with two obsessions: death and celebrity". Damien Hirst has work 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 major public and private collections.