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.
Truth Revealed: Damien Hirst and James Fox on Ashley Bickerton
In conversation with James Fox, Damien Hirst reflects on the artwork of his longtime friend.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2021
The Fall 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Damien Hirst’s Reclining Woman (2011) on its cover.
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.”
Related Exhibitions
Related News
Video
Damien Hirst
Cherry Blossoms
Filmed over the course of a year, this video, produced by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, on the occasion of the exhibition Damien Hirst: Cherry Blossoms, offers a rare glimpse at Hirst’s creative process, providing keys to understanding his work. In the video, Hirst and art historian Tim Marlow discuss how the artist conceived and created the Cherry Blossom paintings.
Still from “Damien Hirst: Cherry Blossoms.” Artwork © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2021
Launch
Damien Hirst
The Currency
On July 14, 2021, Damien Hirst released The Currency—a collection of ten thousand NFTs that correspond to ten thousand unique physical artworks—with HENI on Palm, a new, more environmentally friendly NFT ecosystem. Collectors are invited to apply to buy an NFT through July 21, 2021. Successful applicants will all initially receive NFTs. Ultimately, each collector has one year to decide between keeping the NFT or trading it for the physical artwork; whichever is not selected will be destroyed. The Currency is an experiment in belief in which every participant is confronted with their perception of value, testing the boundaries of the digital and physical worlds and our role in both.
Damien Hirst with works from The Currency (2016). Artwork © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd, DACS 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Video
Damien Hirst
Hylonome
In this time-lapse video, Damien Hirst’s Hylonome (2011) is installed at Gagosian, Rome, for the exhibition Forgiving and Forgetting, on view from July 6 through October 23, 2021. Rendered in Carrara marble, the female centaur, whose statuesque form conjures both Baroque corporeality and the stately symmetry of French Neoclassical sculpture, sparks an unexpected interplay between ancient and modern. The work is from the artist’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, a project that presented sculptural relics from a fictional shipwreck off the coast of East Africa, playing fast and loose with linear time, cultural origin, and perceptions of relative status and value.
Still from “Damien Hirst: Hylonome”
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Reaching for the Stars
From Maurizio Cattelan to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Through June 18, 2023
Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy
www.palazzostrozzi.org
Reaching for the Stars celebrates thirty years since Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo began collecting art. Presenting highlights from her collection, the exhibition includes works by leading international artists and explores the most recent trends in art, embracing painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Work by Glenn Brown, Damien Hirst, and Rudolf Stingel is included.
Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, Ex Unico, 2004 © Rudolf Stingel. Photo: courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Closed
Take Care
Art and Medicine
April 8–July 17, 2022
Kunsthaus Zürich
www.kunsthaus.ch
This group exhibition aims to explore the timeless human preoccupation with health by retracing key moments in medical history from the nineteenth century to present day. More than three hundred works, including drawing, painting, sculpture, video, spatial installation, and performance, examine the productive interplay of sickness, pain, medicine, care, and healing. Work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Duane Hanson, and Damien Hirst is included.
Duane Hanson, Medical Doctor, 1992–94 © 2022 Estate of Duane Hanson/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Closed
Textiles de Artistas
March 12–June 19, 2022
Fundacíon Barrié, A Coruña, Spain
fundacionbarrie.org
This exhibition explores the history of twentieth-century art through fabrics designed by artists, with unique examples from artistic movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop art. Comprised of more than one hundred works, the show presents an important overview of weaving as a popular art form in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe. Work by Alexander Calder, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Sterling Ruby, and Andy Warhol is included.
Closed
Damien Hirst
Cherry Blossoms
March 2–May 23, 2022
National Art Center, Tokyo
www.nact.jp
Damien Hirst: Cherry Blossoms reinterprets the traditional subject of landscape painting with playful irony. In this series Hirst combines thick brushstrokes and elements of gestural painting, referencing Impressionism, Pointillism, and Action painting. The monumental canvases, which are entirely covered in dense, bright colors, envelop the viewer in a vast floral landscape that oscillates between figuration and abstraction. This exhibition has traveled from the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris.
Installation view, Damien Hirst: Cherry Blossoms, National Art Center, Tokyo, March 2–May 23, 2022. Artwork © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2022