Life, Death & Art: The Work of Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst – “Valium”

“Great art — or good art — is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don’t think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.” — Damien Hirst

If you needed one word to describe artist Damien Hirst, you couldn’t do much better than controversial. As a creator working at the top levels of our culture, he has come to define a certain punk ethos and extravagant daring that place him in a category unto himself.

Much of his work focuses on death, a theme that continues to propel him. He goes beyond contemplating nothingness and instead observes the feelings it stirs inside of us — consider the name of one of his most widely acclaimed works, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (1991), in which an immense, dead tiger shark is preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in an clear case for all to see.

He is also known for wrapping images of death in splendor, as in “For the Love of God” (2007), a platinum sculpture of a human skull is bedecked in 8,601 flawless diamonds.

He also examines color for its own sake. His spot paintings are grid-like works made up of dots of random color, and his spin paintings create random color patterns by making use of a rotating base for his substrate.

These diverse interests show the dimensions of the artist: both abstract and all-too embodied. This dichotomy that runs through his career provides Hirst and his fans with a dynamism rarely seen in the contemporary art scene.

His memorable exhibitions and ability to ignite passionate responses (both for and against) have paid off well. Hirst’s net worth is estimated to be $384 million, making him the richest living artist in the United Kingdom. His one-artist auction at Sotheby’s in 2008 made $198 million alone, the highest of its kind.

Early Life + The Allure of Death

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965, and grew up in Leeds in a working class family. As a child, he struggled in many school subjects, except for art. A born enfant terrible, he had a rebellious streak, and became enamored with the punk movement as a teenager —causing a challenging relationship with his single mother.

In 1983, he had a formative experience at the Hayward Gallery where Franic Davison’s abstract col