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.
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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.
For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.
Sydney Stutterheim meditates on the power and possibilities of small-format artworks throughout time.
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
Related News
Support
Damien Hirst
Fruitful and Forever Editions
Organized in collaboration with Fondazione Prada in Milan, Damien Hirst has created four new limited-edition prints to raise money for Save the Children’s campaign Riscriviamo il Futuro (Rewrite the Future). The initiative aims to support Italian children from disadvantaged backgrounds who have been affected by school closures during the covid-19 crisis. The editions, titled Fruitful and Forever, feature bright, abstract details from Hirst’s new series of Cherry Blossom paintings, and are available through September 27, 2020. To purchase the prints, visit leviathan.heni.com.
Damien Hirst, Fruitful, 2020 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates
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
Museum Exhibitions
On View
00s. Collection Cranford
Les années 2000
Through May 30, 2021
Mo.Co. Contemporary, Montpellier, France
www.moco.art
This exhibition of work from the Cranford Collection, established by Muriel and Freddy Salem in 1999, aims to define the identity of the 2000s by creating a dialogue between one hundred artworks by a multigenerational array of artists who contributed to shaping the beginning of the millennium. Work by Glenn Brown, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Albert Oehlen, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Franz West, and Christopher Wool is included.
Albert Oehlen, Schmilzender . . . , 2002 © Albert Oehlen. Photo: Jörg von Bruchhausen
Closed
Damien Hirst
End of a Century
October 7, 2020–March 7, 2021
Newport Street Gallery, London
www.newportstreetgallery.com
End of a Century features over fifty early works by Damien Hirst, spanning his formative years as a student in the 1980s through the 1990s, when he became one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists. Featuring installations, sculpture, and paintings, some of which have not been seen before, the exhibition surveys a selection of Hirst’s most iconic series.
Damien Hirst, Up, Up and Away, 1997 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020
Closed
Colección Jumex
Al filo de la navaja
August 18, 2020–February 14, 2021
Museo Jumex, Mexico City
www.fundacionjumex.org
This exhibition, whose title translates to On the Knife’s Edge, brings together works by more than forty international artists. Comprising four thematic sections—migration and liberty, the human body, the environment, and the inexorable passage of time—the show aims to address the issues shaping our contemporary world. Work by Douglas Gordon and Damien Hirst is included.
Installation view, Colección Jumex: Al filo de la navaja, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, August 18, 2020–February 14, 2021. Artwork, front: © Dan Graham; ceiling: © Studio lost but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021
Closed
Soleils noirs
March 25, 2020–January 25, 2021
Musée du Louvre-Lens, France
www.louvrelens.fr
This sensory exhibition, whose title translates to Black Suns, offers a fresh perspective on the color black, which has been endowed with a multitude of symbolic meanings in Western art from antiquity to the present day. The exhibition features nearly 180 works, intermingling periods and disciplines, and spanning painting, fashion, the decorative arts, the moving image, and installations. Work by Douglas Gordon, Simon Hantaï, and Damien Hirst is included.
Simon Hantaï, Etude I, suite pour Pierre Reverdy, 1969 © Archives Simon Hantaï/ADAGP, Paris, 2020. Photo: Claude Gaspari