On the art scene, a singular figure has emerged, presenting artworks in the form of paintings or sculptures that evoke life after death, controversy, money and even animals 😱. Discover Damien Hirst, an artist who embodies each of these concepts. Our online store team has conducted a relentless investigation into this artist who captivates the media with his morbid art, to provide you with all the juicy details about this fascinating personality.
1) Damien Hirst, the Art of the Corpse
Damien Hirst is a British artist born in Bristol in 1965. Today, he is considered the biggest, if not the only “superstar” in the world of modern art. His artistic career is atypical, in the image of his art, unsettling and sometimes morbid, evoking the fears lurking deep within viewers. 😨
It was thanks to his Beaux-Arts teacher that he was admitted to high school despite his catastrophic results. Despite a keen interest in the subject, his disturbing ideas earned Damien Hirst only an E in art history.
He was subsequently rejected by two prestigious art schools, including the Saint Martin School of Art, before finally entering Goldsmith College of Art. Alongside his studies, he worked in a morgue, which greatly influenced his artistic thinking 👍. His mother later described him as “a morbid child, drawn to gruesome, macabre images of disease and injury.” 🔥THE MOST POPULAR PRODUCTS🔥
These subjects would later fuel some of the artist’s iconic works.
2) On the Road to Artistic Success
1991 saw his first exhibition entitled “In and Out of Love”. The artist fuses each individual’s deepest concerns, exploring the idea of death, how it fits into life, and how both interact with art and visualization. 🎨
The idea for this triangle between art, life and death emerged in his teens, when he frequently visited the anatomy department at Leeds Medical School and worked in the morgue. He exposes this vision through dead animals, cut up and immersed in formalin. 💀
This exhibition was a resounding success and launched the artist’s career. Since then, Damien Hirst has continued to surprise us throughout his career with visual works featuring corpses, skulls and other skulls reinvented in ever more artistic ways.
3) The Art of the Skull
“For the love of God” is one of Damien Hirst’s most famous works. It is a replica of a real human skull that he bought in Islington. The skull was that of an 18th-century man in his thirties.
No alterations had been made to the teeth; they were authentic and original. From this skull, Damien Hirst has created an allegory of our money-perverted society, encrusting the skull with over 8600 diamonds. 💎
This work cost Damien Hirst over £14 million (over €16 million!) to create. This is the price of a platinum-covered, diamond-encrusted skull by jewelers Bentley and Skinner. Ironically, this exorbitant work of art denounces the relentless quest for wealth by confronting it with the brutal representation of death. Despite this, the work sold for over £100 million a year after its creation, showing that the artist’s financial situation was far from precarious. 💵
Paradoxically, this exorbitantly-priced work of art highlights the constant quest for wealth by confronting it with the crude representation of death. Our online store has already addressed the symbolism of the skull and crossbones, and this one only adds another dimension to that reflection!
What’s the point of pursuing wealth excessively throughout one’s life, only to end up rich and dead, like a diamond-set skull.
4) Imaginary Painted Skull
The Skull Spin Paintings are a series of works by the British artist. Once again he uses the imagery of death through a skull, this time drawn. ✏️
These works are created in two layers: one for the background and the other for the skull. The technique is based on spin painting, in which a canvas is mounted on a rotating plate at high speed.
Drops of paint are then poured onto the canvas and spread outwards, propelled by kinetic energy. The result is an extremely colorful rendering, almost like an explosion of color. 💥
Damien Hirst plays on the contrast between the skull, a dark, sad symbol, and the bright colors of the spin paintings. In this way, he attempts to de-demonize death, conveying the message that it is part of the natural cycle of life.
Ultimately, death is only black because the living perceive it that way. It is the living who suffer from death (for example, the loss of loved ones). Death itself doesn’t need to be portrayed in a sad way; it’s a construct of society. 🤨
This is precisely what this series of works conveys at exhibitions of extremely colorful skulls made by Damien Hirst.
5) Animals Died for His Art
At first glance, this work seems both original and morbid. It consists of two cow cadavers 🐮, a mother and child, which have been cut up in their entirety by the artist.
Each of their two body parts, salvaged from slaughterhouses, is dipped in formalin to preserve its structure (a form of varnishing) and placed in two separate containers. In this way, we can “circulate inside the cow”. A unique experience that confronts us with death in all its aspects.
In this work, cows are torn from their natural environment, nature. They are surprisingly present in a gallery, but also simply because of their death. 😵
The artist explains, “In a way, we understand living beings better by dealing with the dead. My cows cut out in formaldehyde have more personality than all the cows walking around in the fields.”
The personality the artist is talking about is the message the cow has to convey.
It evokes human emotions: maternal love, fear of death, loneliness… and Damien Hirst presents them in a brutal, emotionless way: two severed corpses. 😰
6) Eternal Death
To understand Damien Hirst’s work, we need to delve into his conception of death. The artist regularly uses objects evoking death in his works, such as skulls, bones, drawn skulls, animal corpses and so on.
For Hirst, death is not limited to the end of life, to disappearance. It persists in this earthly world through the decomposition of bodies 😷. That’s why he uses so many objects symbolizing death, not as a concept, but as a reality.
For him, the human skull is a perfect representation of the link between life and death, as it exists during the individual’s lifetime and continues to exist after death.
For the artist, there is a “time of life from the death of the body”. A time that Hirst makes eternal by, for example, dipping the corpses in formalin, a chemical substance that preserves the bodies and gives the work a blue color. 🔵
It’s a way of preserving indefinitely what was destined to disappear. In this way, it makes death eternal. Unlike eternal life after death, it represents eternal death in this earthly world. This brings us to an awareness of the ephemerality of our bodies.
7) Desacralizing Man
By desacralizing man, Damien Hirst makes us realize that, deep down, we’re not so different from animals. Not in our way of life or thinking, but in the ephemeral nature of our existence. 👀
When Hirst exhibits an animal corpse to question death, the human being is not questioning the death of cows, but his own death.
In the end, what makes us different from animals once they’re dead? Like the cow corpses on display, once dead, we’re nothing more than a mass of flesh and bone that will end up as a skeleton over time. 🦴
In this way, he demonstrates that, in the face of death, man is not unique among species. Ultimately, we’re just dead bodies destined to disappear, just like every other living thing.
8) Art Defies Death
The triangle formed by life, death and art is the cornerstone of Damien Hirst’s work. All his work can be interpreted through this prism. The opposition between death and life in art is a concept that has existed since the most ancient civilizations, so the artist hasn’t invented anything.
What’s interesting about this triangle is that art is, in essence, what survives after death and is created during life 💪. It is therefore the bridge between these two opposing notions.
When a man dies, he leaves behind a work. In a broader sense, everything we build in our lives that will endure after we die is our art. Whether it’s our home, a book we’ve written, the education we pass on or the donations we make to an association…
All this is one man’s work. Art, in a more restricted sense, is the best discipline to exhibit this reflection on the ephemerality of our bodies and what will continue to live on after we die. 💫
Damien Hirst has established himself as one of the emblematic figures of that death-defying artistic discipline, Art.
9) Controversial artist
Damien Hirst has often been accused of creating art with the sole aim of shocking viewers, seeking more media controversy than deep meaning when exhibiting his contemporary creations.
Indeed, his art is destabilizing to many. Animal corpses, human skeletons, medicine cabinets presented as works of art. But the artist has finally succeeded in imposing his vision by exhibiting in the world’s leading art centers. 🧐
The greatest controversy surrounding his art no longer lies in the meaning of his work, but in the way they are created.
Hirst employs a number of assistants, and does not create all his works, although he does originate and sign them. This is particularly true of the dots painting series, comprising over 1,400 pieces, of which only 25 are created by Hirst himself.
Speaking of design, it’s also another controversy surrounding this artist. Indeed, numerous accusations of plagiarism have been made against him over the course of his career. 😭
Not least for the skull in “The Love of God”, which was allegedly inspired by LeKay‘s 1993 skull. Despite this, he has never been convicted and has settled most of his disputes with financial compensation.
10) Hirst’s Intimate Relationship with Money
Rapper and philosopher Alpha Wann once said, “Artists like to talk about money, bankers like to talk about art”.
Damien Hirst is known as one of the highest-selling living artists of our time. His relationship with money is problematic for some. In particular, he has been criticized for bypassing the galleries that exhibited his work at an auction at Sotheby’s, where he sold an entire collection for over $198 million. A considerable sum on the art market!
In this way, the money goes directly to him, but the practice is disrespectful to the contemporary art galleries he collaborates with.
Asked about his relationship with money, the man recognized as an artist in auditoriums and group shows replies:
“I think money is an essential part of our lives. I’ve always thought it was as important as love or death, something to reconcile with, something to understand. It’s a key and it’s something you have to respect” 🤔
In the same interview, he added: “Sometimes I take the helicopter to my farm, but I don’t have a luxurious lifestyle.” Perhaps, in the end, Damien Hirst is himself caught up in what he denounces through his work “For the Love of God”.
He mustn’t forget that all his wealth will disappear when he’s no more than a skeleton and a skull, and that in the end, only his art will continue to exist. ✊
Damien Hirst is a fascinating character. We come to the end of this article, having omitted many aspects of his art brut: his sculptures, his paintings, the patrons for his works, his artistic influences (Picasso, Van Gogh, Basquiat…), his relationship with painters or any other artistic practice of his contemporary creation.
But it’s up to you to tell us more in the comments if you’d like to know more! In the meantime, you can take a look at our collection of skull paintings, which will give your home a more “Damien Hirst” style. 👀 🔥THE MOST POPULAR PRODUCTS🔥
