Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst is a British contemporary artist and is known for challenging the boundaries between art, religion and science. Known as the original Young British Artist, his art work, sculpture and prints have set record-breaking results at auction.
Hirst’s artwork dominates the contemporary British Art market and we are pleased to offer for sale, limited edition collectors pieces online and in the gallery. Buy original prints from a range of series produced with Heni, including the famous Damien Hirst Cherry Blossom prints, which are hand-signed by the artist.
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 since breaking onto the international art scene in the late 1980s. His work challenges contemporary belief systems and traces the ambiguities that are at the core of the human experience. It ranges from sequential canvases of multicoloured spots to animal specimens preserved in tanks of formaldehyde.
In 1988, when Hirst was still a student at Goldsmiths College in London, he organised an exhibition called "Freeze" which was divided into three parts and featured his work as well as the work of other students. This exhibition is regarded as the debut of the artists who would later become known as the Young British Artists, or YBAs. Their method was distinguished by the use of found materials, a focus in shock and spectacle, and a blend of entrepreneurial and oppositional views. Two of Hirst's paintings that were painted directly onto the wall were included in this exhibition. The Spot paintings (1986–), of which there are now more than one thousand, depict spots of varying colours on backgrounds that are white or nearly white and are painted by hand in glossy house paint. With these works, Hirst sought to paint as a machine yet allow for the subtle imperfections of the artist’s hand. The Spot paintings, like many of Hirst's series, elicit multiple psychological and perceptual dichotomies: they are both peaceful and unsettling, beautiful and mundane.
Cherry Blossoms is a continuation of Damien Hirst's long-term exploration into painting. Landscape painting and the great artistic trends of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Impressionism to Action Painting, are reimagined by the artist with a lighthearted cynicism. The Cherry Blossoms series commemorates the return of the artist to solitary work in his studio after a decade-long sculptural project, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable.
After a long hiatus, Hirst returns to painting and the exhilarating joy he experiences in the medium. He works on several canvases at once, returning to some that he keeps close by even months after they are finished. Hirst completed the Cherry Blossoms series in November 2020, after dedicating three years to it.