About Damien Hirst

Visit artist page follow artist

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Damien Hirst is a global phenomenon. With groundbreaking approaches and some of the most innovative techniques in contemporary art, the visionary conceptual artist and painter has made a name for himself around the world. Today, his work represents a milestone in contemporary art.

The Emotions

With The Emotions, Damien Hirst takes his exploration of blossom, colour and transience in a new direction. The starting point is his Jacaranda paintings, inspired by a pivotal moment during the 2024 Cherry Blossoms exhibition at Museo Jumex in Mexico City: through the glass walls, the painted pink blossoms encountered real Jacaranda trees blooming in blue. Hirst was particularly fascinated by their elusive colouration – blue and violet seem almost to dissolve in the sunlight, mingling with pink and red and, in places, appearing to merge with the sky. His fascination became the beginning of this new series.

Stylistically, The Emotions continues the path of the Cherry Blossoms: away from flawless, machine-like precision and towards a more immediate, vivid form of painting. Fine pointillist dots of colour meet expressive splashes and contrasting textures; newly introduced leaf-shaped stamps give the compositions an organic, rhythmic structure. From a distance, the traces coalesce into luxuriantly flowering trees; up close, they dissolve into individual events of colour. The works share the same format of 120 × 96 cm and can be placed side by side to form an expansive panorama.

Conceptually, too, Hirst shifts the emphasis. While the Cherry Blossoms, and particularly The Virtues, invoke moral and philosophical virtues, The Emotions turns more directly towards the human psyche. With Love, Joy, Serenity, Trust and Inspiration, Hirst gives each work a specific feeling as its point of departure. The vibrating blues, violets, pinks and reds become a resonant field for emotion: love, joy, serenity, trust and inspiration appear less as fixed messages than as moods unfolding between colour, rhythm and perception.

In this way, Hirst extends the fleeting beauty of blossom into an inner dimension. The Jacaranda becomes a symbol of a transient moment in which nature and emotion, colour and memory briefly come together.

Where the Land Meets the Sea

Damien Hirst’s art is known for making waves. In his series Where the Land Meets the Sea, those waves become almost physically tangible: as spray, movement and the untamed energy of the British coastline. The abstract Action Paintings translate the force of the Atlantic into colour while preserving a sense of coastal life that has stayed with Hirst since the seaside walks of his childhood. The process of creation is as essential as the finished image. The starting point was a group of canvases that lay on the floor of Hirst’s studio while he was working on his internationally acclaimed Cherry Blossoms series. Paint splashes that landed on these canvases during the painting process became the foundation of a new body of work.

The grey ground recalls the sky above a turbulent sea. Brilliant colours stand out against it just as powerfully as intense black-and-white contrasts. Inspired by Robert Motherwell’s expressionist Beside the Sea paintings, Hirst moves between gestural painting, photographic memory and abstraction. The result is a series of highly dynamic compositions in which personal biography, painterly energy and the elemental force of the Atlantic converge.

The Beautiful Paintings

Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Paintings bring his famous Spin Paintings into the digital present. From the outset, their creation was shaped by the interplay of control and chance: paint hits a rotating canvas and spreads into rays, streaks and explosive movements – making each work unique.

For the Beautiful Paintings, Hirst transfers this principle into specially developed digital processes. From a palette of more than 250 colours and over 20 different style variations, ever-new combinations of colour, form and movement emerge. Chance remains a decisive element of the composition.

Like the classic Spin Paintings, these works are also conceived on circular supports. Their characteristic form creates a direct connection to the original series while continuing Hirst’s long-standing exploration of uniqueness, variation and authorship.

The role of the collectors is particularly significant: they were able to help shape individual combinations and thereby became part of the creative process themselves. Hirst once again shifts the boundaries between artist, artwork and audience. From the interplay of decision, chance and digital technology emerge intensely coloured works whose visual energy is immediately perceptible.

The Empresses

The butterfly is one of the recurring motifs in Damien Hirst’s work. It symbolises beauty, transformation and transience in equal measure. In the five-part series The Empresses, Hirst combines this motif with historical female figures, opening a view onto rulers from different cultures and eras.

The screenprints, embellished with fine glitter, bear the names of Nur Jahan, Theodora, Wu Zetian, Suiko and Taytu Betul. Their biographies lead into Persian-Indian, Byzantine, Chinese, Japanese and Ethiopian history.

Hirst dedicates not only an individual work to each ruler, but also a distinctive ornamental structure. Only on closer inspection does it become apparent that these patterns are composed of countless butterfly wings. Their form and composition refer to historical and biographical aspects of each empress.

The works thus combine visual opulence with historical memory. They invite the viewer to look beyond their decorative surface and engage with the lives and legacies of women whose influence was far-reaching, but whose stories are often less present in Western cultural memory.

The Virtues

Damien Hirst demonstrates with The Virtues that remaining true to oneself can also mean continually reinventing oneself. The works developed out of his large-scale Cherry Blossoms – a series through which Hirst also approached a subject his mother had long wished to see him paint: flowers.

Over several years, Hirst worked intensively and largely in seclusion on the Cherry Blossoms. Monumental canvases emerged in his London studio, where dense layers of colour, gestural brushstrokes, drips and splashes condensed into flowering landscapes.

Hirst painted, dripped and flung colour onto the canvas, repeatedly stepping back and then moving closer again. From this oscillation between control and exuberance emerged his highly individual interpretation of the Japanese cherry blossom.

Yet for Hirst, the blossom does not signify beauty alone. It also evokes its transience – and with it, one of the central themes running throughout his entire oeuvre: the inseparable connection between life and death.

The Cherry Blossoms were shown, among other venues, at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and the National Art Center, Tokyo. The Virtues translate their lush colour and symbolic resonance into a concentrated body of work in which Hirst’s fascination with beauty, time and transience becomes visible once again.

About the Artist

In the beginning was the dot.

Circular, clearly defined, coloured – at first simple, almost incidental. In the late 1980s, Damien Hirst began creating the dot paintings that would later become one of his best-known bodies of work. Evenly arranged circles of colour formed grid-like structures whose apparent simplicity concealed a complex meditation on colour, order and meaning.

How can colour be used so directly that it becomes both pure appearance and a carrier of meaning? This question has run through Hirst’s work since his early Spot Paintings. Some of these works refer directly to the aesthetics of the pharmaceutical industry. Soft or luminous colours, arranged in serial patterns, recall pills and medical preparations. Hirst intensified this association by naming numerous works after pharmaceutical substances. Scientific language, industrial production and the seductive effect of colour thus enter into an unusual dialogue.

The transfer of meaning from one medium to another is one of the fundamental principles of his art. This became particularly striking in 1991 with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde appears to swim towards the viewer, jaws open, inside a vast glass vitrine. The real animal becomes sculpture, the biological specimen becomes an image of death – and death, in turn, becomes something that escapes our imagination.

Few artists of his generation have repeatedly managed to polarise audiences to such a degree while simultaneously setting the international art market in motion.

In 2007, Hirst once again attracted worldwide attention with For the Love of God: a human skull cast in platinum and set with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink diamond on the forehead. The work became emblematic of an art in which beauty, luxury, provocation and death are inseparably intertwined.

This ambivalence lies at the heart of Hirst’s work. His art repeatedly revolves around the finitude of life – without ever being exclusively morbid. Hirst himself has described his fascination with death rather as a form of celebrating life.

Whether preserved animals, kaleidoscopic butterfly images, colour-exploding Spin Paintings or luxuriant cherry blossoms: in Damien Hirst’s work, life and death, beauty and transience, attraction and unease always exist side by side. It is precisely from this tension that his work continues to derive its enduring power.

VITA

1965	Born in Bristol, UK
1986-1989	Goldsmith College „Fine Arts“
1988	Curator of the exhibition „Freeze“, Surrey Docks, London, UK
1990	Curator of the exhibition „Modern Medicine“, Building One, London, UK
2007	The artwork “For the Love of God” is sold for € 75 Million and is the most expensive work of contemporary art according to British media reports
	Lives in Devon and has Studios in London, Gloucester and Devon, UK

Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions

2026	Nothing Is True But Everything Is Possible, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul, South Korea
2025	Drawings, Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria
2024	To Live Forever (For a While), Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico
	The Light That Shines, Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France
2023-2024	The Weight of Things, MUCA – Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art, Munich, Germany
2023	Where Land Meets the Sea, Phillips, London, UK
2022	The Currency, Newport Street Gallery, London, UK
	Natural History, Gagosian, London, UK
	Cherry Blossoms, National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan
	Myths, Legends and Monsters, Gagosian, Gstaad, Switzerland
	Forgiving and Forgetting, Gagosian, New York, USA
2021	Archaeology Now, Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy
	Cherry Blossoms, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France
	Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures, Gagosian, London, UK
	Cathedrals Built on Sand, Gagosian, Paris, France
	His Own Worst Enemy, White Cube, Hong Kong
	Forgiving and Forgetting, Gagosian, Rome, Italy
2020	End of a Century, Newport Street Gallery, London, UK
2019	Mandalas, White Cube, London, UK
	Damien Hirst, Yorkshire Sculpture Park / Yorkshire Sculpture International, Wakefield, UK
2018	Damien Hirst at Houghton Hall, Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK
	Colour Space Paintings, Gagosian, New York, USA
	The Veil Paintings, Gagosian, Los Angeles, USA
	Damien Hirst, Galerie Bastian, Berlin, Germany
2017	Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Pinault Collection, Venice, Italy
	Visual Candy and Natural History, Gagosian, Hong Kong
2015	Damien Hirst, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway
2014	Black Scalpel Cityscapes, White Cube, São Paulo, Brazil
	Schizophrenogenesis, Paul Stolper Gallery, London, UK
2013	Freedom Not Genius, Multimedia Art Museum / Moscow House of Photography, Moscow, Russia
	Entomology Cabinets and Paintings, Scalpel Blade Paintings and Colour Charts, White Cube, Hong Kong
2012	Damien Hirst, Tate Modern, London, UK
	The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011, Gagosian, international venues
	Two Weeks One Summer, White Cube, London, UK
2010	Cornucopia, Musée Océanographique de Monaco, Monaco
	For the Love of God, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy
2009	Nothing Matters, White Cube, London, UK
2008	Requiem, PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, Ukraine
	For the Love of God, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2007	Beyond Belief, White Cube, London, UK
2006	The Death of God – Towards a Better Understanding of a Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools, Galería Hilario Galguera, Mexico City, Mexico
2005	Damien Hirst, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway
2004	The Agony and the Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989–2004, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, Italy
2003	Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, White Cube, London, UK

(Collection)

Group Exhibitions

2026–2027	The 90s: Art and Fashion, Tate Britain, London, UK
2026	ANIMALIA. Of Animals and Humans, Heidi Horten Collection, Vienna, Austria
2025–2026	Triple Trouble: Shepard Fairey, Damien Hirst, Invader, Newport Street Gallery, London, UK
2020	Colección Jumex: On the Razor’s Edge, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico
	Love, Life, Death, and Desire, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA
2019	Objects of Wonder: British Sculpture from the Tate Collection 1950s–Present, PalaisPopulaire, Berlin, Germany
	Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019, Leeds/Wakefield, UK
2018	The Last Image. Photography and Death, C/O Berlin, Berlin, Germany
2017	Colori. The Emotions of Color in Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy
2016	Creature, The Broad, Los Angeles, USA
	Sculpture on the Move 1946–2016, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland
	LIFE ITSELF, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
2015	Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector, Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK
	What We Call Love: From Surrealism to Now, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
2014	14 Rooms, Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland
2012	Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
	British Design 1948–2012: Innovation in the Modern Age, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
	12 Rooms, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
2011	Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan
	The Luminous Interval, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain
2010	C’est la vie: Vanités de Caravage à Damien Hirst, Musée Maillol, Paris, France
2009–2010	Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Tate Modern, London / Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany
2009	Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
2008	Statuephilia, British Museum, London, UK
	Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA
	Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
2007	Turner Prize: A Retrospective, Tate Britain, London, UK
	RE-OBJECT, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria
2006	The François Pinault Collection: A Post-Pop Selection, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy
	Into Me / Out of Me, MoMA PS1, New York, USA
2005	Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Art Collection, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA
	Prague Biennale 2, Prague, Czech Republic
2004	In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Tate Britain, London, UK
	Monument to Now, DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece
2003	Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
1997	Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK
1988	Freeze, Surrey Docks, London, UK

(Collection)