Since he first came into the public eye when he co-curated the controversial ‘Freeze’ exhibition of 1988, Damien Hirst has created and drawn attention to a generation of artists who became known as the Young British Artists, and played an important part in defining the Britart ‘movement’. From the controversy of Separated From The Flock (a lamb preserved in a glass tank, which was vandalized when included in the ‘Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away’ exhibition Hirst curated for the Serpentine Gallery in 1994), to the political storm surrounding the arrival of ‘Sensation’ in Brooklyn, his work has redefined international expectations of British art. Hirst is also often credited with helping to refocus the London art world from West End Galleries to the industrial spaces of the city, following the success of ‘Freeze’, a Goldsmiths’ show he organised while he was a second year student at the college, which took place in a docklands warehouse.
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The unavoidable element of Hirst’s work is its unblinking confrontation with death, mortality and the brevity of life, whether it is in the form of a 14-foot long tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde, [The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991)], or the beauty of a disused shop full of butterfly pupae hatching from white canvases, feeding on sugar syrup, mating, laying eggs and dying [In and Out of Love (1991)]. But there is another strategy where, through the titles he gives his work and the black humor of the artist, Hirst collapses the formal clarity of the work and its apparently melancholy message, and makes the viewer reconsider the ambivalent creativity that is at work. “I want to set up situations that make people try to find meaning. I don’t think my interpretations are important on a large scale”, he says. Though he has pointed out that in With Dead Head (1991), a photograph showing the youthful Hirst in a mortuary, smiling beside the head of a corpse, his expression betrays fear or nervousness rather than delight. Beyond the glass tank pieces of dead and often cut-open animals for which he is best known, Hirst’s work includes photography, a series of cabinet sculptures and painting. The paintings allow room for both random and methodical practice: the spin paintings are produced on a rotating, uncontrollable table, while the spot paintings are created with geometrical precision, in angst-free colours, and titled after pharmaceutical ingredients. But the relationship between sculptural and painterly practice is close for Hirst: ‘They’re an idea about the ultimate variety of paintings, or what you’d imagine a sculpture would look like under a microscope’.
His work has, almost more than any other artist of the 90s, become familiar via the media, particularly following his Turner Prize win in 1995, and it is a situation that, at least in some ways, he relishes and uses. Hirst has addressed the exchange in his own film-making, which confronts the relationship between art and advertising - his work frequently references billboards and TV commercials, even the slightly suicidal, mini-universe of cigarette smoking. He has directed a pop promo for Blur and Hanging Around, a film for the Hayward Gallery’s 1997 ‘Spellbound’ exhibition. Eyestorm now have available a special artist-designed edition of Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind. The book has a slipcase, thick glass mirrors for front and back covers, a fake metal credit card as a bookmark, and a rolled up $100 bill concealed within a well cut hole in the middle pages, around which the text flows. Hirst describes this edition as ‘an art object with a story running through it’. The story is Robert Sabbag’s 1976 cult classic Snowblind, which recounts the tale of Zachary Swan, a middle-aged advertising executive turned drug smuggler. It was the first book to take a look inside the cocaine trade, and was described by Hunter S Thompson as ‘a flat-out ball buster. It moves like a threshing machine with a fuel tank of ether.’ This limited edition is signed by Hirst, Sabbag, and Howard Marks, who wrote the introduction.