Damien Hirst

About Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965. His installations, sculpture, painting and drawing have sought to challenge the boundaries between art, science and popular culture. His energy and inventiveness, and his consistently visceral, visually arresting work, has made him a leading artist of his generation.

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.

Hirst is equally renowned for his paintings. These include his Amazing Revelations (2003), where he arranged thousands of butterfly wings in a mandala-like pattern. His Spin series are made with a machine that centrifugally disperses the paint steadily poured onto a shaped canvas surface; while his Spot series have a rigorous grid of uniform sized dots. Recently, he has explored photo-realism in the Fact paintings.

He received the DAAD fellowship in Berlin in 1994 and the Turner Prize in 1995.

Hirst explores the uncertainty at the core of human experience; love, life, death, loyalty and betrayal through unexpected and unconventional media. All of his works contain his ironic wit, and question art's role in contemporary culture.

Deckchair Design

Damien donated a deckchair design for Deckchair Dreams Collection 2007.

His limited edition of 250 deckchairs have now sold out, raising vital funds for the Royal Parks. About his design, he told us:

It's supposed to represent a summer's day and I chose the pink for girls and the blue for boys."