Damien Steven Hirst (Mother: Mary Brennan; Former Partner: Maia Norman; Children: Connor Oula, Cassius Atticus, and Cyrus Joe) (born 1965) is a British conceptual artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), a movement that dominated the UK art scene in the 1990s and gained international notoriety for its shock tactics, entrepreneurial spirit, and use of unconventional materials.
Hirst’s career was launched in 1988 when, while still a student at Goldsmiths College, he conceived and curated “Freeze,” an independent student exhibition in a London warehouse. This show caught the attention of influential art collector Charles Saatchi, who became an early patron of Hirst’s work.
Hirst’s art frequently explores the complex relationships between art, religion, science, life, and death. He is most famous for his Natural History series, in which dead animals—including sharks, sheep, and cows—are preserved and displayed in clear tanks filled with formaldehyde. The most iconic of these is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a 14-foot tiger shark suspended in a vitrine, which became a defining symbol of Britart worldwide.
Alongside his installations, Hirst is known for his highly recognizable “Spot Paintings” (rows of randomly colored circles created by his assistants) and “Spin Paintings” (created using a rotating canvas). In 2007, he created For the Love of God, a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, questioning the morality and economics of the modern art market.
Hirst won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1995. In 2008, he made an unprecedented move by bypassing his galleries and selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, directly through Sotheby’s auction house, raising over $200 million and cementing his reputation as a master of art market economics.
Active in others filds : Art Collecting (The Murderme Collection), Curation, Restaurant Design and Ownership (e.g., the Pharmacy restaurant), Publishing.
