Colourful spots, animals frozen in time, glorious butterfly wings and a skull set with diamonds are just some icons of Damien Hirst’s boundary-redefining career. Internationally recognised for his irreverent approach to artmaking, blurring the lines between media and expanding their possibilities, Hirst has helped set contemporary art on a practically limitless course. Through a decisive interplay of technology, technique and material, Hirst’s artworks engage with his signature themes of love, death, religion, science, belief and beauty to create works that are both visually and conceptually compelling.

Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, grew up in Leeds and moved to London in 1984. While studying at Goldsmiths School of Art from 1986-89, Hirst invented two fundamental series: his ongoing ‘Spot Paintings’, made up of meticulously rendered spheres of random colours arranged in perfect grid systems; and his ‘Medicine Cabinets’, an early investigation into science, medicine and systems of belief and trust that resurfaces across his oeuvre.  

In 1992, Hirst unveiled arguably his most iconic work ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991), a four-metre-long tiger shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, and inserted his ‘Natural History’ series into the public consciousness. These sculptures simultaneously confront viewers with their own mortality and the unavoidable fate of death.

Hirst’s enduring confrontations with death emerge again in his butterfly works. Since his 1991 exhibition ‘In and Out of Love’, he has continued to readapt the butterfly motif. Hirst produces awe-inspiring compositions using their wings, as in his ‘Kaleidoscope’ series began in 2001, a formula that has entered a new chapter in the HENI prints series ‘The Aspects’ (H6, 2019), ‘The Elements’ (H6, 2020) and ‘The Empresses’ (H10, 2022). In these collections, the technology and materiality of the prints advance the symbolic resonance of the butterfly, standing for the possibility of beauty in death. 

Since 1994, Hirst has produced his joyful ‘Spin Paintings’. These works are made with minimal artist intervention, the final product reliant only on colour choice and force of movement. These paintings inspired ‘Enter the Infinite’ (H1, 2016), 12 jacquard-woven tapestries that constitute further delegation of the artistic process to a machine. ‘The joy of colour’ and colour relationships are themes to which Hirst frequently returns, as in ‘Colour Charts’ (2012), ‘Colour Space’ (2016), ‘Veil Paintings’ (2017) and their eponymous print series. 

In 2017, Hirst revealed ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’, which include hundreds of sculptures and drawings apparently salvaged from a shipwreck. This project foregrounded Hirst’s interest in belief systems, questioning structures that attract trust and value. Hirst’s 2021 project ‘The Currency’ further explores this idea, asking collectors to choose between the traditional medium of painting and the contemporary NFT, forcing them to put faith in where they see value. 

From 2018-20, Hirst produced ‘Cherry Blossoms’. The monumental canvases, entirely covered in dense, bright colours, envelop the viewer in a vast landscape of blooming trees that traverses the boundaries of figuration and abstraction. From these works, Hirst made his ‘Fruitful & Forever’ (H8, 2020) and ‘The Virtues’ (H9, 2021) print series, playfully presenting macro and micro details of the paintings that bring their tactile impasto to the fore. 

Hirst’s name is synonymous with contemporary art, continually pushing the boundaries of traditional approaches to and conceptions of the artwork. Hirst’s prints, editions and multiples are a fundamental part of this practice. Though wide-ranging in nature, together these works are magnificent exercises in how technique, technology and materiality can be manipulated to enhance the discourse and reception of Hirst’s subjects. 

Damien Hirst

Colourful spots, animals frozen in time, glorious butterfly wings and a skull set with diamonds are just some icons of Damien Hirst’s boundary-redefining career. Internationally recognised for his irreverent approach to artmaking, blurring the lines between media and expanding their possibilities, Hirst has helped set contemporary art on a practically limitless course. Through a decisive interplay of technology, technique and material, Hirst’s artworks engage with his signature themes of love, death, religion, science, belief and beauty to create works that are both visually and conceptually compelling.

With spurts of blue, yellow and green shooting vertically, and green, yellow and red horizontally, Damien Hirst’s tapestry ‘Enter the Infinite – Dream’ is incredibly potent. Based on a ‘Spin Painting’ from 2008, Hirst juxtaposes its aesthetic of randomness here with his careful mathematical process of division, reflection and repetition.  

Such exactness nonetheless produces sporadic visual reactions. The tapestry takes the eye on an uneasy journey into and out of the work’s centre. The eye cannot contain the patterns of colours and the shifting perspectives of inward and outward motion, the design thus constituting a reflection on its limits and functions. 

Hirst’s experimentations with the eye are also present in the medium itself: the jacquard-woven process requires only a small selection of colours which the eye optically blends. That ‘Enter the Infinite – Dream’ is a tapestry also links it to the medium’s historical associations to concepts such as belief and spectacle, which Hirst explores elsewhere in his practice.  

‘Enter the Infinite – Dream' is visually arresting as it apparently captures the intense motion of the spinning technology in a moment of stasis. Motion, expanded and emphasised, emerges as both the image’s unequivocally awe-inspiring form and composition.  

Enter the Infinite - Dream

Enter the Infinite

With spurts of blue, yellow and green shooting vertically, and green, yellow and red horizontally, Damien Hirst’s tapestry ‘Enter the Infinite – Dream’ is incredibly potent. Based on a ‘Spin Painting’ from 2008, Hirst juxtaposes its aesthetic of randomness here with his careful mathematical process of division, reflection and repetition.  