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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.

Cannizaro

Keukenhof

Sans Souci

Andromeda

Garden of Dreams

Nong Nooch

Ryoanji

Damien Hirst’s ‘Veils’ (H4) is a riotous ensemble of variously coloured dots of thick paint. Consisting of zoomed-in details of the artist’s eponymous series of 24 paintings, this collection of eight Diasec-mounted Giclée prints on aluminium panels transports viewers deep into Hirst’s world of colour. 

‘Veils’ was released in two parts, first in 2018 with four prints and another four again in 2020. The second release occurred in response to the financial struggles facing art institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, $100,000 of the total sales of the prints released in 2020 was donated to Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland and Serpentine Gallery, London, UK, in support of these institutions that play a fundamental role in the display and interpretation of contemporary art in Europe. 

The ‘Veil Paintings’ series emerged in 2017 in the immediate lead up to the unveiling of Hirst’s monumental exhibition of his new series ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ in Venice within the same year. Several years in the making and with the involvement of a large team, ‘Treasures’ naturally proved gruelling, encouraging Hirst to return to the studio and leading him back to solo painting. In doing so, Hirst left behind the chaos of the ‘Treasures’ production to create immersive and mediative canvases which explode with colour. 

Of his ‘Veil Paintings’, Hirst said, “I want you to get lost in them, I want you to fall into them, and I want them to delight your eyes and make you want to stay in the painting”. Recalling his iconic ‘Spot Paintings’ (begun in 1986) and ‘Visual Candy’ (1993) paintings, ‘Veil Paintings’ embrace both colour and artistic gesture on a large scale. The paintings continued Hirst’s investigation of colour relationships using thick, clustered and colourful brushstrokes, celebrating “colour and chaos in a big way”. Referencing Pointillism and particularly the great French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard, Hirst took the technique developed and scale used in ‘Veil Paintings’ to his ‘Cherry Blossoms’ (2018-20) series.

The canvases are entirely covered by abstract layers of colour, permitting the images to work like veils to both reveal and conceal an inner truth, “the thing that we are searching for”. In his ‘Veils’ prints, Hirst utilises titles to position the painting series in a new way. Named after eight of the worlds most extraordinary gardens, from Sanssouci in Potsdam to Kaiser Mahal Kathmandu in Nepal, the compositions evoke fields of flowers, their blossoms clustered together and masking the ground underneath. 

Translating the enormous paintings into accessible prints and spotlighting their details in great clarity, ‘Veils’ affords viewers the opportunity to focus on the pure, rich qualities of Hirst’s colours, and be wholly immersed in the abstracted botanical imagery their titles so evocatively suggest. 

Veils

Damien Hirst’s ‘Veils’ (H4) is a riotous ensemble of variously coloured dots of thick paint. Consisting of zoomed-in details of the artist’s eponymous series of 24 paintings, this collection of eight Diasec-mounted Giclée prints on aluminium panels transports viewers deep into Hirst’s world of colour. 

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst

Editions