Damien Hirst

I like to say something and deny it at the same time.
—Damien Hirst

Gagosian is pleased to announce Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures, an exhibition of rarely seen works by Damien Hirst created between 1993 and 2021. The exhibition marks the first phase of Hirst’s yearlong takeover of the Britannia Street gallery, and is his first in the space since The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011 in 2012. Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures sees Hirst as both artist and curator, presenting this deeply personal series of work through his own eyes.

Throughout his storied career, Hirst has confronted the systems of belief that define human existence, from common trust in medicine to the seduction of consumerism. At a moment when the idea of “truth” has never been more tenuous, Hirst’s Fact Paintings and Sculptures question the obduracy of “fact” as a governing principle of society.

Mimicking color photographs, the Fact Paintings are rendered in oil on canvas, sometimes with meticulous fidelity, at others reveling in the physicality of mark making. Their verisimilitude recalls the historical role of painting as a tool to represent the visible world and lead the viewer to believe that a two-dimensional image is, in fact, the three-dimensional object it portrays. With the birth of photography in the nineteenth century, painting’s relationship with reality continued to evolve. Hirst’s Fact Paintings explore this back and forth between the brush and the camera as the agents of “truth.”