Artist Spotlight
Since emerging onto the international art scene in the late 1980s, Damien Hirst has created installations, sculptures, paintings, and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art and beauty, religion and science, and life and death. From serialized paintings exploring color and its effects on the eye to cabinets arranged with pills, medicines, or surgical instruments, his work challenges contemporary belief systems, tracing the uncertainties that lie at the heart of human experience.
Created in response to the covid-19 pandemic, the Artist Spotlight series highlights individual artists, one week at a time, whose exhibitions have been affected by the health crisis. A single artwork by the artist is made available with pricing information for forty-eight hours only.
Artist Spotlight: Damien Hirst features a recent work by the artist. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.
#GagosianSpotlight
Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020
Damien Hirst: Visual Candy
James Fox considers the origins of Damien Hirst’s Visual Candy paintings on the occasion of a recent exhibition of these early works in Hong Kong.
Damien Hirst: Colour Space Paintings
Blake Gopnik examines the artist’s “dot” paintings in relation to the history of representation in Western art, in which dabs of paint have served as fundamental units of depiction and markers of objective truth.
In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings
Damien Hirst speaks about his Veil paintings with Gagosian’s Alison McDonald. “I wanted to make paintings that were a celebration,” he says, “and that revealed something and obscured something at the same time.”
The River Café Cookbook
London’s River Café, a culinary mecca perched on a bend in the River Thames, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2018. To celebrate this milestone and the publication of her cookbook River Café London, cofounder Ruth Rogers sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss the famed restaurant’s allure.
Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt
Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.
Related Exhibitions
Broadcast
Alternate Meanings in Film and Video: Chapter One
May 19–June 1, 2020
Gagosian Online
Visions of the Self: Rembrandt and Now
In partnership with English Heritage
April 12–May 18, 2019
Grosvenor Hill, London
Extended through August 10, 2018
Damien Hirst
Colour Space Paintings
May 4–August 10, 2018
555 West 24th Street, New York
Damien Hirst
The Veil Paintings
March 1–April 14, 2018
Beverly Hills
Related News
Support
Damien Hirst
Rainbow Editions
Damien Hirst has created two limited-edition prints, each available in two different sizes, to support NHS Charities Together and the Felix Project. The prints, respectively titled Butterfly Rainbow and Butterfly Heart, both feature rainbow-colored bands of photographed butterfly wings, and will be available for purchase until midnight BST on Monday, May 25. The edition size will be determined by demand within the time limit of sale, and 100 percent of the profits will be donated to the charities. To purchase the prints, visit rainbow.henieditions.com.
Damien Hirst, Butterfly Rainbow, 2020 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020
Public Installation
Damien Hirst
Hymn
March 26–July 15, 2018
Norwich University of the Arts, UK
www.nua.ac.uk
Damien Hirst’s monumental sculpture Hymn (1999–2005) is on display at Norwich University of the Arts through mid-July. The twenty-foot-high painted bronze sculpture is based on an anatomical toy Hirst bought for his son. The installation coincides with a major exhibition of the artist at nearby Houghton Hall in Norfolk.
Damien Hirst, Hymn, 1999–2005 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2018
Art Fair
Basel Online 2020
In our most significant online sales presentation to date, Gagosian unveils important works by modern and contemporary masters through two separate online platforms—Gagosian Online and Art Basel Online. These individually curated selections offer collectors direct access to artworks of the highest caliber. To experience the presentation in its entirety, viewers will need to visit both gagosian.com and artbasel.com. The works on gagosian.com will rotate every forty-eight hours, for a total of five cycles.
Helen Frankenthaler, Orange Underline, 1963 © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Mythologies
The Beginning and End of Civilizations
Through October 18, 2020
ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark
www.aros.dk
This exhibition attempts to expose the mythological narratives that have sustained society through various historical epochs and had a governing influence on communities as well as on war and destruction. By highlighting specific historical points of interest, the show aims to uncover periods where old narratives are discarded and new ones emerge, often via radical ruptures. Work by Damien Hirst and Anselm Kiefer is included.
Damien Hirst, Mermaid, 2014 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020
On View
Dyr i kunsten
Through January 10, 2021
Arken Museum, Ishoj, Denmark
uk.arken.dk
Dyr i kunsten, or Animals in Art, features sculpture, installations, video, photography, and paintings by a wide array of international artists whose work explores the ways that humans study, categorize, live with, and use animals and how we thus attempt to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves. Work by Douglas Gordon, Damien Hirst, and Carsten Höller is included.
Installation view, Dyr i kunsten, Arken Museum, Ishoj, Denmark, May 26, 2020–January 10, 2021. Artwork © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020. Photo: David Stjernholm
Closed
Amuse-Bouche
The Taste of Art
February 19–July 26, 2020
Museum Tinguely, Basel
www.tinguely.ch
Amuse-Bouche: The Taste of Art presents works—some with a participatory element—by more than forty-five international artists from the Baroque period to the present that explore taste as a dimension of aesthetic perception. Breaking with the usual museum practice of appealing primarily to the sense of sight, works in the exhibition offer art historical and phenomenological encounters with the sense of taste. Work by Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann is included.
Installation view, Amuse-Bouche: The Taste of Art, Museum Tinguely, Basel, February 19–July 26, 2020. Artwork, left to right: © Opavivará!; © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020. Photo: Gina Folly © 2020 Museum Tinguely, Basel
Closed
Ikonen
Was wir Menschen anbeten
October 19, 2019–March 1, 2020
Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany
www.kunsthalle-bremen.de
This exhibition, whose title translates to Icons: Worship and Adoration, presents a single masterpiece in each of the museum’s sixty galleries complemented by everyday icons—from consumer brands to icons of popular culture, offering an interpretation of the traditional notion of the icon in art juxtaposed with the proliferation of icons in everyday life. The presentation examines various aspects of spirituality, devotion, and adoration. Work by Francis Bacon, Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, Yves Klein, Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman, and Andy Warhol is included.
Damien Hirst, Liberation, 2019, installation view, Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020