Monday, 13 July 2009
Saturday, 2 August 2008
cv de Damien H
Damien Hirst
CV
1965 Born, Bristol
1989 Graduated, Goldsmiths College, London
Currently lives and works in Devon
Solo Exhibitions
2007 Damien Hirst, The Goss-Michael Foundation, Texas
Damien Hirst, Galería Hilario Galguera and Museo Nacional de San Carlos, Mexico
New Religion, Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Venice
Beyond Belief, White Cube Masons Yard, London
Beyond Belief, White Cube Hoxton Square, London
Stations of the Cross, Essl Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna
New Religion, Paul Stolper Gallery and Wallspace, London
Superstition, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
Superstition, Gagosian Gallery, London
Damien Hirst, Portland Art Museum, Oregon
2006 Corpus: Drawings 1981 - 2006, Gagosian Gallery, New York
A Thousand Years & Triptychs, Gagosian Gallery, London
The Death of God. Towards a Better Understanding of a Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools, Galería Hilario Galguera, Mexico
2005 New Religion, Paul Stolper, London
Damien Hirst. Works on Paper, Robert Sandelson, London
Damien Hirst, Astrup Fearnley Museet fur Moderne Kunst, Oslo
Damien Hirst, Static Gallery, Liverpool
The Elusive Truth!, Gagosian Gallery, New York
Damien Hirst. In A Spin, Gascoigne Gallery, Harrogate
Damien Hirst – Works on Paper, Andipa Gallery, London
A Selection of Works by Damien Hirst from Various Collections, MFA Boston, Boston
2004 The Agony and The Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989-2004, Archaeological Museum, Naples
2003 Romance In the Age of Uncertainty, White Cube, London
From the Cradle to the Grave: Selected Drawings, The 25th International Biennale of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; The Marble Palace, Russian State Museum
Damien Hirst, The Saatchi Gallery, London
Damien Hirst In A Spin; The Action of the World on Things, Galerie Aurel Scheibler
2002 Damien Hirst’s art education, The Reliance, Leeds
2000 Damien Hirst, Sadler’s Wells, London
Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings, Gagosian Gallery, New York
1999 Pharmacy, Tate Gallery, London
1998 Damien Hirst, Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton
1997 The Beautiful Afterlife, Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich
Solo Exhibition, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo
1996 No Sense of Absolute Corruption, Gagosian Gallery, New York
1995 Pharmacy, Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Still, Jay Jopling/White Cube, London
Prix Eliette von Karajan ‘95, Max Gandolph-Bibliothek, Salzburg
1994 Making Beautiful Drawings, Bruno Brunnet Fine Arts, Berlin
Currents 23, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin
A Bad Environment for White Monchrome Paintings, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh
A Good Environment for Coloured Monochrome Paintings, DAAD Gallery, Berlin
Pharmacy, Dallas Museum, Texas
1993 Visual Candy, Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Damien Hirst, Galerie Jablonka, Cologne
1992 Where’s God Now, Jay & Donatella Chiat, New York
Marianne, Hildegard, Unfair/Jay Jopling, Cologne
Damien Hirst : Third International Istanbul Biennial, British Council, Istanbul
Pharmacy, Cohen Gallery, New York
1991 When Logics Die, Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris
Internal Affairs, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
In & Out of Love, Woodstock Street, London
Group Exhibitions
2008 You Dig The Tunnel, I’ll Hide The Soil, White Cube, Hoxton Square and Shoreditch Town Hall, London
Art Machines, Museum Tinguely, Basel
Broad Contemporary Art Museum, LACMA, Los Angeles
Turner Prize: A retrospective, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow
Turner Prize: A retrospective, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican, London
2007 Play Back, ARC/Musée de la Ville de Paris, Paris
Art Machines, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
The Turner Prize: A Retrospective, Tate Britain, London
‘Re-Object’, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz
Relationships: Contemporary Sculpture, York Art Gallery, York
Aftershock: Contemporary British Art 1990-2006, Capital Museum, Beijing
Draw, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough
2006 How To Improve The World, Hayward Gallery, London
Surprise Surprise, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Eretica, Museum Sant’Anna, Palermo
Sculpture, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills
Motion On Paper, Ben Brown Fine Arts, London
Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Kenny Schachter, London
Into Me/Out of Me, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York
Summer Exhibition 2006, Royal Academy of Arts, London
Dada’s Boys. Identity and Play in Contemporary Art, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
INFINITE PAINTING: Contemporary Painting and Global Realism, Villa Manin Centro D’Arte Contemporanea, Passariano
Modern Time. Work, Machineries and Automation in the Arts of 1900, Commune di Genoa and Palazzo Ducale, Genoa
Drawing Inspiration, Abbot Hal Art Gallery, Kendal
Sixty Years of Sculpture in the Arts Council Collection, Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Picture This, The Bargehouse, London
2005 Revelation. Reflecting British Art in the Arts Council Collection, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne; The Lowry, Manchester
Summer Exhibition, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Extreme Abstraction, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Vertigo, Meadow Gallery, Sudeley Castle, Winchcombe
MO(NU)MENTS! Works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Norway
London Calling. Y[oung] B[ritish] A[rtists] Criss-Crossed, Galleri Kaare Berntsen, Oslo
Bidibidobidiboo. La Collezione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Piazza del Municipio, Guarene d’Alba, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
Figure It Out, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, New York
An International Legacy: Selections from Carnegie Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio
Logical Conclusions, Pacewildenstein, New York
Major Prints, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
Imageless Icons: Abstract Thoughts, Gagosian Gallery, London
2004 100 Artists See God, ICA, London
What’s Modern?, Gagosian Gallery, New York
Paper Democracy. Contemporary Art in Editions on Paper, Edifício Cultura Inglesa, São Paulo
Printers Inc.: Recent British Prints, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester / Brewhouse Theatre and Arts Centre, Taunton / Park Gallery, Falkirk
Intra-muros, MAMAC, Nice
Works and Days. Acquisitions for the Louisiana Collection 2000-2004, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk
Monument To Now, Nea Ionia Exhibition Space, DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens
Den Haag Sculpture Project, Den Haag
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
Is One Thing Better Than Another, Aurel Scheibler, Cologne
The Stations of the Cross, Gagosian Gallery, London
La Collection D’Art Contemporain D’Agnes B, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse
Daddy Pop, Anne Faggionato, London
Secrets of the ‘90s, Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, Arnhem
Symbolic Space & Repetition, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, New York
Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Tate Britain, London
Turning Points: 20th Century British Sculpture, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran
Mike Kelley: The Uncanny, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool
Drawings, Gagosian Gallery, London
The Big Eat in Art, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld
2003 Love Over Gold, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
Outlook, Athens
Switch, Museum Dhont – Dhaenens, Belgium
Bull’s Eye; Works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection, Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst,Arken
In Good Form; Recent Sculpture from the Arts Council Collection, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield
Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, 50th Venice Biennale
2002 It’s Unfair, Museum de Pavilijeons, Netherlands
Le Part de l’Autre, Carre d’Art Musée d’art Contemporaine, Nimes
Limits of Perception, Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona
To Eat or Not to Eat, CASA. Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Salamanca
Painting Matter, James Cohen Gallery, New York
Medicate, The Art Gallery and Museum, Royal Pump Rooms, The Parade, Royal Lemington Spa
The Rowan Collection. Contemporary British & Irish Art, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Self-Medicated, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
From Twilight to Dawn: Postmodern Art from the UBS PaineWebber Collection, The Frist Centre for Visual Arts, Nashville
Last Spring in Paris, Jablonka Galerie, Cologne
2001 Artist’s London: Holbein to Hirst, Museum of London, London
Art –Tube 01, Café De Paris, London
Printers Inc., The Gallery, Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Art > Music, Rock Pop Techno, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
Double Vision, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig
Freestyle. Werke Aus der Sammlung Boros, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen
Beautiful Productions. Art to play, art to wear, art to own, Whitechapel, London
Camera Works. The Phographic Impulse in Contemporary Art, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
Warhol/Koons/Hirst: Cult and Culture, Selections from the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado
Field Day, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan
Public Offerings, The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles
Complementary Studies. Recent Abstract Painting, Harris Museum Art Gallery, Preston
Breaking the Mould: 20th Century British Sculpture from Tate, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery
Century City, Tate Modern, London
2000 Hyper Mental, Kunsthaus Zurich/Hamburger Kunsthalle
Lets Entertain, Walker Arts Centre, Minniapolis; Portland Art Museum; Centre Georges Pompidou; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico; Miami Art Museum
Balls, James Cohan Gallery, New York
Peter Blake About Collage, Tate Liverpool
After Life, 11 Duke Street, London
The History of the Turner Prize, 1984-1999 and People’s Show 2: Pictures selected by the public, Victoria Art Gallery, Bath
Video Vibe. Art, Music and Video in the UK, The British School at Rome, Rome
Minding, Le Garage, Geneva
Zeitgenossen/Contemporarians:Malerei/Paintings, Galerie Editions Kunsthandel GmbH, Essen
On the Edge of the Western World, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, San Francisco
Out There, White Cube², Hoxton, London
Ant Noises, Saatchi Gallery, London
Art in Sacred Spaces, St. Stephen’s Church, London
Psycho, Anne Faggionato, London
Blue: borrowed and new, The New At Gallery, Walsall
Sincerely yours. British art from the 90s, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo
1999 The History of the Turner Prize, ArtSway, Sway
Wallworks, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich
Thin Ice, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Leeds 13 - Fine Arts. The Degree Show, University of Leeds Fine Art, Leeds
Now It’s My Turn to Scream. Works by Contemporary British Artists from the Logan Collection, Haines Gallery, San Francisco
Fourth Wall. Turner on the Thames, Southbank, London
Fun de Siecle, Group Show, Walsall Museum and Art Gallery, Walsall
Examining Pictures, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Infra-slim spaces, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama
Group Exhibition, Rhyl Library, Museum and Art Centre, Liverpool
...On the sublime..., Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden
1998 Potrait of Our Times: An Introduction to the Logan Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
UK Maximum Diversity, Galerie Krinzinger, Benger Fabrik Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria
Wall Projects: Damien Hirst, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Fun de Siècle, Walsall Museum and Art Gallery, Walsall
Pandaemonium. The London Festival of Moving Image, LEA, London
Fifty Years of British Sculpture: Works from the Arts Council Collection, Lothbury Gallery, London
Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Charles Ray, 11 Duke Street, London
The Colony Room 50th Anniversary Art Exhibition, A22 Projects, London
London Calling. Contemporary British art from Italian private Collections, Part
II: The Eighties and Nineties, The British School at Rome/Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna
Zone Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Guarene, Italy
Inner Eye. Contemporary Art from the Marc and Livia Straus Collection, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida
Modern British Art, Tate Gallery, Liverpool
Noir, Triennale di Milano, Milan
Veronica’s Revenge(Lambert Art Collection, Geneva), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen
Wild/Life, -or-, The Impossibility of Mistaking Nature for Culture, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, North Carolina
1997 Dimensions Variable, British Council Touring Exhibition
Sensation, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Brooklyn Museum, New York
Picture Britanica. Art from Britain, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide;Te Papa, Wellington, New Zealand
Turning Up #4, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany
Package Holiday, Hydra Workshops, Hydra, Greece
Sunny Days / Critical Times. An Exhibition of Works from the Bohen Foundation’s Collection, The Bohen Foundation, New York
Veronica’s Revenge : Oeuvres photographiques de la Lambert Art
Collection, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva
Material Culture, Hayward Gallery, London
A Ilha do Tesouro, Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon
The Lost Ark, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
1996 Life/Live, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Centro de Exposições do Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon
Zeit-Spiegel I, Städtishces Museum Schloß Morsbroich, Leverkusen
Other Men’s Flowers, Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Cologne
Faustrecht der Freiheit (Volkmann Collection), Kunstsammlung Gera, Berlin; Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen
Do It, Raum Aktueller Kunst, Vienna
Private View, The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham
Twentieth Century British Sculpture, Jeu de Paume, Paris
A Small Shifting Sphere of Serious Culture, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Spellbound, Hayward Gallery, London
Works on Paper, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Happy End, Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf
Chaos, Madness - Moods in Contemporary Art, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria
1995 Drawing the Line, (National Touring Exhibition from the South Bank Centre) Southampton City Art Gallery; Manchester City Art Gallery; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
New Art in Britain, Museum Sztuki, Polland
Sings and Wonders, Kunsthaus, Zurich
Minky Manky, South London Gallery , London; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol
From Here, Waddington Galleries, London/Karsten Schubert, London
A Bonnie Situation : Truth and Fiction, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
Laboratories, Galerie Art et Essai, University of Rennes, Brittany
The Reflected Image, Museo Pecci, Prato, Italy
Turner Prize Exhibition, Tate Gallery, London [winner]
Brilliant! Art from London, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
British Art Show 4, National Touring Exhibition Organised by the Hayward Gallery, London; Manchester; Edinburgh; Cardiff
1994 Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away, (curated by Damien Hirst),Serpentine Gallery, London; Nordic Arts Centre, Helsinki; Kunstverein, Hannover; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Portalen, Copenhagen
Domestic Violence, Gio Marconi, Milan
Virtual Reality, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Cocido Y Crudo, Reina Sofia, Madrid
Nature Morte, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Art Unlimited, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery; Corner House, Manchester; South Bank Centre, London; Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich; Brighton University Gallery
Über – Leben, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn
From Beyond the Pale, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
1993 Here and Now : Twenty Three Years of the Serpentine Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, London
The 21st Century, Kunsthalle, Basel
The Nightshade Family, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel
Aperto : Venice Biennial, Aperto Section, Venice
Displace, Cohen Gallery, New York
A Wonderful Life, Lisson Gallery, London
1992 Young British Artists, Saatchi Collection, London
Made for Arolsen, Schloss, Arolsen, Germany
Moltiplici / Cultura, Rome
London Portfolio, Karsten Schubert Ltd., London
Posthuman, Fondation Asher Edelman, Lausanne; Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Torino; Deichtorhallen, Chamburg
Group Exhibition, Luis Campaña Gallery, Frankfurt
Strange Developments, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London
British Art, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Avantgarde & Kampagne, Stadtische Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf
Turner Prize Exhibition, Tate Gallery, London
Under Thirty, Galerie Metropol, Vienna
1991 Damien Hirst, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Louder Than Words, The Cornerhouse, Manchester
Broken English,Serpentine Gallery, London
1990 Modern Medicine, Building One, London
Gambler, Building One, London
1989 New Contemporaries, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
1988 Freeze, Surrey Docks, London
CV
1965 Born, Bristol
1989 Graduated, Goldsmiths College, London
Currently lives and works in Devon
Solo Exhibitions
2007 Damien Hirst, The Goss-Michael Foundation, Texas
Damien Hirst, Galería Hilario Galguera and Museo Nacional de San Carlos, Mexico
New Religion, Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Venice
Beyond Belief, White Cube Masons Yard, London
Beyond Belief, White Cube Hoxton Square, London
Stations of the Cross, Essl Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna
New Religion, Paul Stolper Gallery and Wallspace, London
Superstition, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
Superstition, Gagosian Gallery, London
Damien Hirst, Portland Art Museum, Oregon
2006 Corpus: Drawings 1981 - 2006, Gagosian Gallery, New York
A Thousand Years & Triptychs, Gagosian Gallery, London
The Death of God. Towards a Better Understanding of a Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools, Galería Hilario Galguera, Mexico
2005 New Religion, Paul Stolper, London
Damien Hirst. Works on Paper, Robert Sandelson, London
Damien Hirst, Astrup Fearnley Museet fur Moderne Kunst, Oslo
Damien Hirst, Static Gallery, Liverpool
The Elusive Truth!, Gagosian Gallery, New York
Damien Hirst. In A Spin, Gascoigne Gallery, Harrogate
Damien Hirst – Works on Paper, Andipa Gallery, London
A Selection of Works by Damien Hirst from Various Collections, MFA Boston, Boston
2004 The Agony and The Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989-2004, Archaeological Museum, Naples
2003 Romance In the Age of Uncertainty, White Cube, London
From the Cradle to the Grave: Selected Drawings, The 25th International Biennale of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; The Marble Palace, Russian State Museum
Damien Hirst, The Saatchi Gallery, London
Damien Hirst In A Spin; The Action of the World on Things, Galerie Aurel Scheibler
2002 Damien Hirst’s art education, The Reliance, Leeds
2000 Damien Hirst, Sadler’s Wells, London
Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings, Gagosian Gallery, New York
1999 Pharmacy, Tate Gallery, London
1998 Damien Hirst, Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton
1997 The Beautiful Afterlife, Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich
Solo Exhibition, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo
1996 No Sense of Absolute Corruption, Gagosian Gallery, New York
1995 Pharmacy, Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Still, Jay Jopling/White Cube, London
Prix Eliette von Karajan ‘95, Max Gandolph-Bibliothek, Salzburg
1994 Making Beautiful Drawings, Bruno Brunnet Fine Arts, Berlin
Currents 23, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin
A Bad Environment for White Monchrome Paintings, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh
A Good Environment for Coloured Monochrome Paintings, DAAD Gallery, Berlin
Pharmacy, Dallas Museum, Texas
1993 Visual Candy, Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Damien Hirst, Galerie Jablonka, Cologne
1992 Where’s God Now, Jay & Donatella Chiat, New York
Marianne, Hildegard, Unfair/Jay Jopling, Cologne
Damien Hirst : Third International Istanbul Biennial, British Council, Istanbul
Pharmacy, Cohen Gallery, New York
1991 When Logics Die, Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris
Internal Affairs, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
In & Out of Love, Woodstock Street, London
Group Exhibitions
2008 You Dig The Tunnel, I’ll Hide The Soil, White Cube, Hoxton Square and Shoreditch Town Hall, London
Art Machines, Museum Tinguely, Basel
Broad Contemporary Art Museum, LACMA, Los Angeles
Turner Prize: A retrospective, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow
Turner Prize: A retrospective, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican, London
2007 Play Back, ARC/Musée de la Ville de Paris, Paris
Art Machines, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
The Turner Prize: A Retrospective, Tate Britain, London
‘Re-Object’, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz
Relationships: Contemporary Sculpture, York Art Gallery, York
Aftershock: Contemporary British Art 1990-2006, Capital Museum, Beijing
Draw, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough
2006 How To Improve The World, Hayward Gallery, London
Surprise Surprise, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Eretica, Museum Sant’Anna, Palermo
Sculpture, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills
Motion On Paper, Ben Brown Fine Arts, London
Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Kenny Schachter, London
Into Me/Out of Me, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York
Summer Exhibition 2006, Royal Academy of Arts, London
Dada’s Boys. Identity and Play in Contemporary Art, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
INFINITE PAINTING: Contemporary Painting and Global Realism, Villa Manin Centro D’Arte Contemporanea, Passariano
Modern Time. Work, Machineries and Automation in the Arts of 1900, Commune di Genoa and Palazzo Ducale, Genoa
Drawing Inspiration, Abbot Hal Art Gallery, Kendal
Sixty Years of Sculpture in the Arts Council Collection, Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Picture This, The Bargehouse, London
2005 Revelation. Reflecting British Art in the Arts Council Collection, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne; The Lowry, Manchester
Summer Exhibition, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Extreme Abstraction, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Vertigo, Meadow Gallery, Sudeley Castle, Winchcombe
MO(NU)MENTS! Works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Norway
London Calling. Y[oung] B[ritish] A[rtists] Criss-Crossed, Galleri Kaare Berntsen, Oslo
Bidibidobidiboo. La Collezione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Piazza del Municipio, Guarene d’Alba, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
Figure It Out, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, New York
An International Legacy: Selections from Carnegie Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio
Logical Conclusions, Pacewildenstein, New York
Major Prints, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
Imageless Icons: Abstract Thoughts, Gagosian Gallery, London
2004 100 Artists See God, ICA, London
What’s Modern?, Gagosian Gallery, New York
Paper Democracy. Contemporary Art in Editions on Paper, Edifício Cultura Inglesa, São Paulo
Printers Inc.: Recent British Prints, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester / Brewhouse Theatre and Arts Centre, Taunton / Park Gallery, Falkirk
Intra-muros, MAMAC, Nice
Works and Days. Acquisitions for the Louisiana Collection 2000-2004, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk
Monument To Now, Nea Ionia Exhibition Space, DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens
Den Haag Sculpture Project, Den Haag
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
Is One Thing Better Than Another, Aurel Scheibler, Cologne
The Stations of the Cross, Gagosian Gallery, London
La Collection D’Art Contemporain D’Agnes B, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse
Daddy Pop, Anne Faggionato, London
Secrets of the ‘90s, Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, Arnhem
Symbolic Space & Repetition, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, New York
Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Tate Britain, London
Turning Points: 20th Century British Sculpture, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran
Mike Kelley: The Uncanny, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool
Drawings, Gagosian Gallery, London
The Big Eat in Art, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld
2003 Love Over Gold, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
Outlook, Athens
Switch, Museum Dhont – Dhaenens, Belgium
Bull’s Eye; Works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection, Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst,Arken
In Good Form; Recent Sculpture from the Arts Council Collection, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield
Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, 50th Venice Biennale
2002 It’s Unfair, Museum de Pavilijeons, Netherlands
Le Part de l’Autre, Carre d’Art Musée d’art Contemporaine, Nimes
Limits of Perception, Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona
To Eat or Not to Eat, CASA. Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Salamanca
Painting Matter, James Cohen Gallery, New York
Medicate, The Art Gallery and Museum, Royal Pump Rooms, The Parade, Royal Lemington Spa
The Rowan Collection. Contemporary British & Irish Art, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Self-Medicated, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
From Twilight to Dawn: Postmodern Art from the UBS PaineWebber Collection, The Frist Centre for Visual Arts, Nashville
Last Spring in Paris, Jablonka Galerie, Cologne
2001 Artist’s London: Holbein to Hirst, Museum of London, London
Art –Tube 01, Café De Paris, London
Printers Inc., The Gallery, Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Art > Music, Rock Pop Techno, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
Double Vision, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig
Freestyle. Werke Aus der Sammlung Boros, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen
Beautiful Productions. Art to play, art to wear, art to own, Whitechapel, London
Camera Works. The Phographic Impulse in Contemporary Art, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
Warhol/Koons/Hirst: Cult and Culture, Selections from the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado
Field Day, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan
Public Offerings, The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles
Complementary Studies. Recent Abstract Painting, Harris Museum Art Gallery, Preston
Breaking the Mould: 20th Century British Sculpture from Tate, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery
Century City, Tate Modern, London
2000 Hyper Mental, Kunsthaus Zurich/Hamburger Kunsthalle
Lets Entertain, Walker Arts Centre, Minniapolis; Portland Art Museum; Centre Georges Pompidou; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico; Miami Art Museum
Balls, James Cohan Gallery, New York
Peter Blake About Collage, Tate Liverpool
After Life, 11 Duke Street, London
The History of the Turner Prize, 1984-1999 and People’s Show 2: Pictures selected by the public, Victoria Art Gallery, Bath
Video Vibe. Art, Music and Video in the UK, The British School at Rome, Rome
Minding, Le Garage, Geneva
Zeitgenossen/Contemporarians:Malerei/Paintings, Galerie Editions Kunsthandel GmbH, Essen
On the Edge of the Western World, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, San Francisco
Out There, White Cube², Hoxton, London
Ant Noises, Saatchi Gallery, London
Art in Sacred Spaces, St. Stephen’s Church, London
Psycho, Anne Faggionato, London
Blue: borrowed and new, The New At Gallery, Walsall
Sincerely yours. British art from the 90s, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo
1999 The History of the Turner Prize, ArtSway, Sway
Wallworks, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich
Thin Ice, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Leeds 13 - Fine Arts. The Degree Show, University of Leeds Fine Art, Leeds
Now It’s My Turn to Scream. Works by Contemporary British Artists from the Logan Collection, Haines Gallery, San Francisco
Fourth Wall. Turner on the Thames, Southbank, London
Fun de Siecle, Group Show, Walsall Museum and Art Gallery, Walsall
Examining Pictures, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Infra-slim spaces, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama
Group Exhibition, Rhyl Library, Museum and Art Centre, Liverpool
...On the sublime..., Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden
1998 Potrait of Our Times: An Introduction to the Logan Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
UK Maximum Diversity, Galerie Krinzinger, Benger Fabrik Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria
Wall Projects: Damien Hirst, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Fun de Siècle, Walsall Museum and Art Gallery, Walsall
Pandaemonium. The London Festival of Moving Image, LEA, London
Fifty Years of British Sculpture: Works from the Arts Council Collection, Lothbury Gallery, London
Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Charles Ray, 11 Duke Street, London
The Colony Room 50th Anniversary Art Exhibition, A22 Projects, London
London Calling. Contemporary British art from Italian private Collections, Part
II: The Eighties and Nineties, The British School at Rome/Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna
Zone Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Guarene, Italy
Inner Eye. Contemporary Art from the Marc and Livia Straus Collection, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida
Modern British Art, Tate Gallery, Liverpool
Noir, Triennale di Milano, Milan
Veronica’s Revenge(Lambert Art Collection, Geneva), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen
Wild/Life, -or-, The Impossibility of Mistaking Nature for Culture, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, North Carolina
1997 Dimensions Variable, British Council Touring Exhibition
Sensation, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Brooklyn Museum, New York
Picture Britanica. Art from Britain, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide;Te Papa, Wellington, New Zealand
Turning Up #4, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany
Package Holiday, Hydra Workshops, Hydra, Greece
Sunny Days / Critical Times. An Exhibition of Works from the Bohen Foundation’s Collection, The Bohen Foundation, New York
Veronica’s Revenge : Oeuvres photographiques de la Lambert Art
Collection, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva
Material Culture, Hayward Gallery, London
A Ilha do Tesouro, Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon
The Lost Ark, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
1996 Life/Live, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Centro de Exposições do Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon
Zeit-Spiegel I, Städtishces Museum Schloß Morsbroich, Leverkusen
Other Men’s Flowers, Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Cologne
Faustrecht der Freiheit (Volkmann Collection), Kunstsammlung Gera, Berlin; Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen
Do It, Raum Aktueller Kunst, Vienna
Private View, The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham
Twentieth Century British Sculpture, Jeu de Paume, Paris
A Small Shifting Sphere of Serious Culture, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Spellbound, Hayward Gallery, London
Works on Paper, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Happy End, Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf
Chaos, Madness - Moods in Contemporary Art, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria
1995 Drawing the Line, (National Touring Exhibition from the South Bank Centre) Southampton City Art Gallery; Manchester City Art Gallery; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
New Art in Britain, Museum Sztuki, Polland
Sings and Wonders, Kunsthaus, Zurich
Minky Manky, South London Gallery , London; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol
From Here, Waddington Galleries, London/Karsten Schubert, London
A Bonnie Situation : Truth and Fiction, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
Laboratories, Galerie Art et Essai, University of Rennes, Brittany
The Reflected Image, Museo Pecci, Prato, Italy
Turner Prize Exhibition, Tate Gallery, London [winner]
Brilliant! Art from London, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
British Art Show 4, National Touring Exhibition Organised by the Hayward Gallery, London; Manchester; Edinburgh; Cardiff
1994 Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away, (curated by Damien Hirst),Serpentine Gallery, London; Nordic Arts Centre, Helsinki; Kunstverein, Hannover; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Portalen, Copenhagen
Domestic Violence, Gio Marconi, Milan
Virtual Reality, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Cocido Y Crudo, Reina Sofia, Madrid
Nature Morte, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Art Unlimited, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery; Corner House, Manchester; South Bank Centre, London; Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich; Brighton University Gallery
Über – Leben, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn
From Beyond the Pale, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
1993 Here and Now : Twenty Three Years of the Serpentine Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, London
The 21st Century, Kunsthalle, Basel
The Nightshade Family, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel
Aperto : Venice Biennial, Aperto Section, Venice
Displace, Cohen Gallery, New York
A Wonderful Life, Lisson Gallery, London
1992 Young British Artists, Saatchi Collection, London
Made for Arolsen, Schloss, Arolsen, Germany
Moltiplici / Cultura, Rome
London Portfolio, Karsten Schubert Ltd., London
Posthuman, Fondation Asher Edelman, Lausanne; Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Torino; Deichtorhallen, Chamburg
Group Exhibition, Luis Campaña Gallery, Frankfurt
Strange Developments, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London
British Art, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Avantgarde & Kampagne, Stadtische Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf
Turner Prize Exhibition, Tate Gallery, London
Under Thirty, Galerie Metropol, Vienna
1991 Damien Hirst, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Louder Than Words, The Cornerhouse, Manchester
Broken English,Serpentine Gallery, London
1990 Modern Medicine, Building One, London
Gambler, Building One, London
1989 New Contemporaries, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
1988 Freeze, Surrey Docks, London
damien h y las calaveras
Damien Hirst
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Damien Hirst
Born 7 June 1965
Bristol, England
Nationality British
Field Conceptual art, installation art, painting
Training Leeds College of Art and Design, Goldsmiths
Movement Young British Artists
Works The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, For the Love of God
Patrons Charles Saatchi
Awards Turner Prize
Damien Hirst (born June 7, 1965) is an English artist and the most prominent of the group that has been dubbed "Young British Artists" (or YBAs). Hirst dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s and is internationally renowned. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
Death is a central theme in Hirst's works. He became famous for a series in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. His most iconic work is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine. Its sale in 2004 made him the world's second most expensive living artist after Jasper Johns. In June 2007, Hirst overtook Johns when his Lullaby Spring sold for £9.65 million at Sotheby's in London.[1] On 30 August 2007, Hirst outdid his previous sale of Lullaby Spring with For The Love of God which sold for £50 million to an unknown investment group. [2] He is also known for "spin paintings," made on a spinning circular surface, and "spot paintings," which are rows of randomly-coloured circles.
Contents [hide]
1 Life
2 Career
2.1 Breakthrough 1988–1991
2.2 "Saatchi years" 1991–2003
2.3 Post-Saatchi, 2004–
3 Work philosophy
3.1 Appropriation
3.2 Assistants
4 Critical response
4.1 For
4.2 Against
5 Hirst's own collection
6 Restaurant ventures
7 Artworks
8 See also
9 Notes and references
10 External links
[edit] Life
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. His father was a motor mechanic, who left the family when Hirst was 12.[3] His mother, Mary, was a lapsed Catholic, who worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau and says she lost control of him when he was young.[3] He was arrested on two occasions for shoplifting.[3] However, Hirst sees her as someone who would not tolerate rebellion: she cut up his bondage trousers and heated one of his Sex Pistols vinyl records on the cooker to turn it into a fruit bowl. He says, "If she didn't like how I was dressed, she would quickly take me away from the bus stop." She did, though, encourage his liking for drawing, which was his only successful educational subject.[4]
His art teacher "pleaded"[4] for Hirst to be allowed to enter the sixth form,[4] where he took two A-levels, achieving an "E" grade in art.[3] He went to Leeds College of Art and Design, although the first time he applied he was refused admission. He worked for two years on London building sites, then studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London[3] (1986–89), although again he was refused a place the first time he applied. While a student, Hirst had a placement at a mortuary, an experience that influenced his later themes and materials.
Hirst has admitted serious drug and alcohol problems during a ten year period from the early 1990s: "I started taking cocaine and drink ... I turned into a babbling fucking wreck."[5] During this time he was renowned for his wild behaviour and extrovert acts, including for example, putting a cigarette in the end of his penis in front of journalists. He was an habitué of the high profile Groucho Club in Soho, London, and was banned on occasion for his behavior.
In 2002 Hirst gave up smoking and drinking, although the short-term result was that his wife Maia "had to move out because I was so horrible." He had met Joe Strummer (former lead singer of The Clash) at Glastonbury in 1995, becoming good friends and going on annual family holidays with him. Just before Christmas 2002, Strummer died of a heart attack. This had a profound effect on Hirst, who said, "It was the first time I felt mortal." He subsequently devoted a lot of time to founding a charity, Strummerville, to help young musicians.[4]
He is married to a Californian, Maia Norman, and has three sons, Connor, born in 1995, Cassius, born in 2000 and Cyrus born in 2007. Since the birth of Connor, he has spent most of his time at his remote farmhouse, a 300 year old former inn, in north Devon.
[edit] Career
[edit] Breakthrough 1988–1991
In July 1988 in his second year at Goldsmiths College, Hirst was the main organiser of an independent student exhibition, Freeze, in a disused London Port Authority administrative block in London's Docklands. He gained sponsorship from the London Docklands Development Corporation. The show was visited by Charles Saatchi, Norman Rosenthal and (Sir) Nicholas Serota, thanks to the influence of Goldsmiths' lecturer Michael Craig-Martin. Hirst's own contribution to the show consisted of a cluster of cardboard boxes painted with household paint.[6]
After graduating, Hirst was included in New Contemporaries show and in a group show at Kettles Yard Gallery in Cambridge. Seeking a gallery dealer, he first approached Karsten Schubert, but was turned down.
In 1990 Hirst, along with his friend Carl Freedman and Billee Sellman, curated two influential "warehouse" shows, Modern Medicine and Gambler, in a Bermondsey former factory they designated "Building One." Saatchi arrived at the second show in a green Rolls Royce and, according to Freedman, stood open-mouthed with astonishment in front of (and then bought) Hirst's first major "animal" installation, A Thousand Years, consisting of a large glass case containing maggots and flies feeding off a rotting cow's head.
Hirst first gained general public notoriety that same year when one of his works was featured as a send-up in a British tabloid newspaper.
In 1991 his first solo exhibition, organised by Tamara Chodzko - Dial, In and Out of Love, was held in an unused shop on Woodstock Street in central London; he also had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in Paris. The Serpentine Gallery presented the first survey of the new generation of artists with the exhibition Broken English, in part curated by Hirst.
At this time Hirst met the up-and-coming art dealer Jay Jopling who has continued to represent him.
[edit] "Saatchi years" 1991–2003
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst (1991)Saatchi had offered to fund whatever artwork Hirst wanted to make, and the result was showcased in 1992 in the first Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in North London. Hirst's work was titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and was a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine. It cost Saatchi £50,000. The shark had been caught by a commissioned fisherman in Australia and had cost £6,000.[7] The exhibition also included A Thousand Years. As a result of the show, Hirst was nominated for that year's Turner Prize, but it was awarded to Grenville Davey.
In 1993, Hirst's first major international presentation was in the Venice Biennale with the work, Mother and Child Divided, a cow and a calf cut into sections and exhibited in a series of separate vitrines. He curated the show Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away in 1994 at the Serpentine Gallery in London, where he exhibited Away from the Flock (a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde). On 9 May, Mark Bridger, a 35 year old artist from Oxford, poured black ink into it, and retitled the work Black Sheep. He was subsequently prosecuted, at Hirst's wish, and was given two years' probation. The sculpture was restored at a cost of £1,000.
In 1995, Hirst won the Turner Prize. New York public health officials banned Two Fucking and Two Watching featuring a rotting cow and bull, because of fears of "vomiting among the visitors". There were solo shows in Seoul, London and Salzburg. He directed the video for the song "Country House" for the band Blur. No Sense of Absolute Corruption, his first solo show in the Gagosian Gallery in New York was staged the following year. In London the short film, Hanging Around, was shown—written and directed by Hirst and starring Eddie Izzard. In 1997 the Sensation exhibition opened at the Royal Academy in London. A Thousand Years and other works by Hirst were included, but the main controversy occurred over other artists' works. It was nevertheless seen as the formal acceptance of the YBAs into the establishment.
Beautiful revolving sphincter, oops brown painting by Damien HirstIn 1998, his critically-acclaimed autobiography/art book, I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, was published. With Alex James of the band Blur and actor Keith Allen, he formed the band Fat Les, achieving a number 2 hit with a raucous football-themed song Vindaloo, followed up by Jerusalem with the London Gay Men's Chorus. Hirst also painted a simple colour pattern for the Beagle 2 probe. This pattern was to be used to calibrate the probe's cameras after it had landed on Mars. He turned down the British Council's invitation to be Britain's representative at the 1999 Venice Biennale because "it didn't feel right".[8] He sued British Airways claiming a breach of copyright over an advert design with coloured spots for its low budget airline, Go.
In 2000, Hirst's sculpture Hymn (which Saatchi had bought for a reported £1m) was given pole position at the show Ant Noises (an anagram of "sensation") in the Saatchi Gallery. Hirst was then sued himself for breach of copyright over this sculpture (see Appropriation below).[9] Hirst sold three more copies of his sculpture for similar amounts to the first.[10] In September 2000, in New York, Larry Gagosian held the Hirst show, Damien Hirst: Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings. 100,000 people visited the show in 12 weeks and all the work was sold.
On September 10, 2002, on the eve of the first anniversary of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, Hirst said in an interview with BBC News Online:
The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of like an artwork in its own right ... Of course, it's visually stunning and you've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible - especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing."[11] The next week, following public outrage at his remarks, he issued a statement through his company, Science Ltd:
I apologise unreservedly for any upset I have caused, particularly to the families of the victims of the events on that terrible day."[12]
In April 2003, the Saatchi Gallery opened at new premises in County Hall, London, with a show that included a Hirst retrospective. This brought a developing strain in his relationship with Saatchi to a head (one source of contention had been who was most responsible for boosting their mutual profile). Hirst disassociated himself from the retrospective to the extent of not including it in his CV. He was angry that a Mini car that he had decorated for charity with his trademark spots was being exhibited as a serious artwork. The show also scuppered a prospective Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern. He said Saatchi was "childish"[4] and "I'm not Charles Saatchi's barrel-organ monkey ... He only recognises art with his wallet ... he believes he can affect art values with buying power, and he still believes he can do it."[13]
In September 2003 he had an exhibition Romance in the Age of Uncertainty at Jay Jopling's White Cube gallery in London, which made him a reported £11m,[4] bringing his wealth to over £35m. It was reported that a sculpture, Charity, had been sold for £1.5m to a Korean, Kim Chang-Il, who intended to exhibit it in his department store's gallery in Seoul.[14] The 22 foot (6.7m) 6 ton sculpture was based on the 1960s Spastic Society's model, which is of a girl in leg irons holding a collecting box. In Hirst's version the collecting box is shown broken open and is empty.
Charity was exhibited in the centre of Hoxton Square, in front of the White Cube. Inside the gallery downstairs were 12 vitrines representing Jesus's disciples, each case containing mostly gruesome, often blood-stained, items relevant to the particular disciple. At the end was an empty vitrine, representing Christ. Upstairs were four small glass cases, each containing a cow's head stuck with scissors and knives. It has been described as an "extraordinarily spiritual experience" in the tradition of Catholic imagery.[15] At this time Hirst bought back 12 works from Saatchi (a third of Saatchi's holdings of Hirst's early works), via Jay Jopling, for a total fee reported to exceed £8 million. Hirst had sold these pieces to Saatchi in the early 1990s for a considerably smaller sum, his first installations costing less than £10,000.[13]
[edit] Post-Saatchi, 2004–
Virgin Mother by Damien HirstOn May 24, 2004, a fire in the Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including 17 of Hirst's, although the sculpture Charity survived, as it was outside in the builder's yard.
In July 2004 Hirst commented about Saatchi, "I respect Charles. There's not really a feud. If I see him, we speak, but we were never really drinking buddies."[4]
In late 2004, Hirst designed a cover for the Band Aid 20 charity single featuring the "Grim Reaper" with an African child perched on his knee. This was not to the liking of the record company executives and was replaced by reindeer in the snow standing next to a child.
In December 2004, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was sold by Saatchi to American collector Steve Cohen, for $12 million (£6.5 million), in a deal negotiated by Hirst's New York agent, Gagosian.[16] Cohen, a Greenwich hedge fund manager, then donated the work to MoMA, New York. Sir Nicholas Serota had wanted to acquire it for the Tate Gallery, and Hugo Swire, Shadow Minister for the Arts, tabled a question to ask if the government would ensure it stayed in the country.[17] Current export regulations do not apply to living artists.
In March 2005, Hirst exhibited 30 paintings at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. These had taken 3 1/2 years to complete. They were closely based on photos, mostly by assistants (who were rotated between paintings) but with a final finish by Hirst.[18]
In February 2006, Hirst opened a major show in Mexico, at the Hilario Galguera Gallery, called The Death of God, Towards a Better Understanding of Life without God aboard The Ship of Fools. The exhibition attracted considerable media coverage as Hirst's first show in Latin America.
In June 2006 Hirst exhibited alongside the work of Francis Bacon (Triptychs) at the Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London. Included in the exhibition was the seminal vitrine, A Thousand Years (1990), and four triptychs: paintings, medicine cabinets and a new formaldehyde work entitled The Tranquility of Solitude (For George Dyer), influenced by Francis Bacon.
For the Love of God by Damien Hirst (2007)A Thousand Years, one of Hirst's most provocative and engaging works, contains an actual life cycle. Maggots hatch inside a white minimal box, turn into flies, then feed on a bloody, severed cow's head on the floor of a claustrophobic glass vitrine. Above, hatched flies buzz around in the closed space. Many meet a violent end in an insect-o-cutor; others survive to continue the cycle. A Thousand Years was admired by Francis Bacon, who in a letter to a friend a month before he died, wrote about the experience of seeing the work at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Margarita Coppack notes that "It is as if Bacon, a painter with no direct heir in that medium, was handing the baton on to a new generation." Hirst has openly acknowledged his debt to Bacon, absorbing the painter's visceral images and obsessions early on and giving them concrete existence in sculptural form with works like A Thousand Years.[19]
In May 2007, Beyond Belief, an exhibition of Hirst's new work, opened at the White Cube gallery in London. The centre-piece, a Memento Mori titled For The Love of God, was a human skull recreated in platinum and adorned with 8,601 diamonds weighing a total of 1,106.18 carats. Approximately £15,000,000 worth of diamonds were used. It was modelled on an 18th century skull, but the only surviving human part of the original is the teeth.[20]
In June 2007, Hirst gained the auction record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist — his Lullaby Spring, a 3 metre (10 ft) wide steel cabinet with 6,136 pills, sold for 19.2 million dollars to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar.[21]
On August 30, 2007, For the Love of God was sold for £50,000,000 (100 million dollars or 75 million euros).[20]
[edit] Work philosophy
Although Hirst participated physically in the making of early works, he has always needed assistants (Carl Freedman helped with the first vitrines), and now the volume of work produced necessitates a "factory" setup, akin to Andy Warhol's or a Renaissance studio. This has led to questions about authenticity, as was highlighted in 1997, when a spin painting that Hirst said was a "forgery" appeared at sale, although he had previously said that he often had nothing to do with the creation of these pieces.
LSD by Damien HirstHirst said that he only painted five spot paintings himself because, "I couldn't be fucking arsed doing it"; he described his efforts as "shite"—"They're shit compared to ... the best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel. She's brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel." He also describes another painting assistant who was leaving and asked for one of the paintings. Hirst told her to, "'make one of your own.' And she said, 'No, I want one of yours.' But the only difference, between one painted by her and one of mine, is the money.'"[5] By February 1999, two assistants had painted 300 spot paintings.[22]
Hirst sees the real creative act as being the conception, not the execution, and that, as the progenitor of the idea, he is therefore the artist:
“ Art goes on in your head," he says. "If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down. Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings. There are on-going ideas I've been working out for years, like how to make a rainbow in a gallery. I've always got a massive list of titles, of ideas for shows, and of works without titles. ”
Hirst is also known to volunteer repair work on his projects after a client has made a purchase. For example, this service was offered in the case of the suspended shark purchased by Steven A. Cohen.[23][24][25]
[edit] Appropriation
In 1999, chef Marco Pierre White said Hirst's Butterflies On Mars had plagiarised his own work, Rising Sun, which he then put on display in the restaurant Quo Vadis in place of the Hirst work.[26]
In 2000, Hirst was sued for breach of copyright over his sculpture, Hymn, which was a 20-foot (6.1 m), six ton, enlargement of his son Connor's 14" Young Scientist Anatomy Set, designed by Norman Emms, 10,000 of which are sold a year by Hull-based toy manufacturer Humbrol for £14.99 each.[9] Hirst paid an undisclosed sum to two charities, Children Nationwide and the Toy Trust in an out-of-court settlement,[9] as well as a "good will payment" to Emms.[26] The charitable donation was less than Emms had hoped for. Hirst also agreed to restrictions on further reproductions of his sculpture.[9]
Spiritus Callidus #2 by John Lekay, 1993, crystal skullIn 2006, a graphic artist and former research associate at the Royal College of Art, Robert Dixon, stated Hirst's print Valium had "unmistakable similarities" to one of his own designs. Hirst's manager contested this by explaining the origin of Hirst's piece was from a book The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry (1991)—not realising this was where Dixon's design had been published.[27][26]
In 2007, artist John LeKay said he was a friend of Damien Hirst 1992–1994 and had given him a "marked-up duplicate copy" of a Carolina Biological Supply Company catalogue, adding "You have no idea how much he got from this catalogue. The Cow Divided is on page 647 – it is a model of a cow divided down the centre, like his piece." This refers to Hirst’s work Mother and Child, Divided—a cow and calf cut in half and placed in formaldehyde.[27] LeKay also claimed Hirst had copied the idea of For the Love of God from LeKay's crystal skulls made in 1993, and said, "I would like Damien to acknowledge that 'John really did inspire the skull and influenced my work a lot.'"[27]
[edit] Assistants
Artists who have worked as assistants for Hirst include Rachel Howard.[28]
[edit] Critical response
[edit] For
Hirst has been praised in recognition of his celebrity and the way this has galvanised interest in the arts, raising the profile of British art and helping to (re)create the image of "Cool Britannia". In the mid-1990s, the then-Heritage Secretary, Virginia Bottomley recognised him as "a pioneer of the British art movement", and even sheep farmers were pleased he had raised increased interest in British lamb. Andres Serrano is also known for shocking work and understands that contemporary fame does not necessarily equate to lasting fame, but backs Hirst: "Damien is very clever ... First you get the attention ... Whether or not it will stand the test of time, I don't know, but I think it will." Sir Nicholas Serota commented, "Damien is something of a showman ... It is very difficult to be an artist when there is huge public and media attention. Because Damien Hirst has been built up as a very important figure, there are plenty of sceptics ready to put the knife in."[29] Tracey Emin said: "There is no comparison between him and me; he developed a whole new way of making art and he's clearly in a league of his own. It would be like making comparisons with Warhol."[30] Despite Hirst's insults to him, Saatchi remains a staunch supporter, labelling Hirst a genius[29] and stating:
“ General art books dated 2105 will be as brutal about editing the late 20th century as they are about almost all other centuries. Every artist other than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Damien Hirst will be a footnote.[31] ”
[edit] Against
A Dead Shark Isn't Art, Stuckism International Gallery 2003There has been equally vehement opposition to Hirst's work. Norman Tebbit commenting on the Sensation exhibition, wrote "Have they gone stark raving mad? The works of the 'artist' are lumps of dead animals. There are thousands of young artists who didn't get a look in, presumably because their work was too attractive to sane people. Modern art experts never learn."[32] The view of the tabloid press is summed up by a Daily Mail headline: "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all." The Evening Standard art critic, Brian Sewell, said simply, "I don't think of it as art ... It is no more interesting than a stuffed pike over a pub door. Indeed there may well be more art in a stuffed pike than a dead sheep."[33] The Stuckist art group was founded in 1999 with a specific anti-Britart agenda by Charles Thomson (artist) and Billy Childish;[34] Hirst is one of their main targets. They wrote (referring to a Channel 4 programme on Hirst):
“ The fact that Hirst's work does mirror society is not its strength but its weakness - and the reason it is guaranteed to decline artistically (and financially) as current social modes become outmoded. What Hirst has insightfully observed of his spin-paintings in Life and Death and Damien Hirst is the only comment that needs to be made of his entire oeuvre: "They're bright and they're zany - but there's fuck all there at the end of the day."[33] ”
In 2003, under the title A Dead Shark Isn't Art, the Stuckism International Gallery exhibited a shark which had first been put on public display two years before Hirst's by Eddie Saunders in his Shoreditch shop, JD Electrical Supplies. Thomson asked, "If Hirst’s shark is recognised as great art, then how come Eddie’s, which was on exhibition for two years beforehand, isn’t? Do we perhaps have here an undiscovered artist of genius, who got there first, or is it that a dead shark isn’t art at all?" [35] The Stuckists suggested that Hirst may have gotten the idea for his work from Saunders' shop display.[36]
[edit] Hirst's own collection
In November 2006 Hirst was curator of In the darkest hour there may be light, the first public exhibition of (a small part of) his own collection. Now known as the ‘murderme collection’, this significant accumulation of works spans several generations of international artists, from well-known figures such as Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, Tracey Emin, Richard Prince and Andy Warhol, to artists in earlier stages of their careers like Rachel Howard, Nicholas Lumb and Tom Ormond.
“As a human being, as you go through life, you just do collect. It was that sort of entropic collecting that I found myself interested in, just amassing stuff while you’re alive.” - Damien Hirst, 2006.
Hirst is currently restoring the Grade I listed Toddington Manor, near Cheltenham, where he intends to eventually house the complete collection.
In 2007, Hirst donated the 1991 sculptures "The Acquired Inability to Escape" and "Life Without You" and the 2002 work "Who is Afraid of the Dark?" (fly painting), and an exhibition copy from 2007 of "Mother and Child Divided" to the Tate Museum from his own personal collection of works.
[edit] Restaurant ventures
Hirst had a short-lived partnership with chef Marco Pierre White in the restaurant Quo Vadis.
Hirst's best known restaurant involvement was Pharmacy, located in Notting Hill, London, which closed in September 2003. Although one of the owners, Hirst had only leased his art work to the restaurant, so he was able to retrieve and sell it at a Sotheby's auction, earning over £11 million. Some of the work had been adapted, e.g. by signing it prior to the auction.[37].
Hirst opened and currently helps to run a seafood restaurant, 11 The Quay, in the seaside town of Ilfracombe in the UK.
[edit] Artworks
His works include:
In and Out of Love (1991), an installation of potted plants, caterpillars and monochrome canvases painted with sugar solution and glue. There were also (in a separate room) tables with ashtrays containing used cigarette butts. Eventually, the caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies, and the insects become fixed to the surfaces of the canvases. In its now fixed form, the work is held by the Yale Center for British Art and is on regular exhibit there.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. This piece was one of the works in his Turner Prize nomination show.
Pharmacy(1992), a life-size recreation of a chemist's shop.
A Thousand Years (1991), composed of a vitrine with a glass division. In one half is the severed head of a cow on the floor; in the other is an insect electrocutor. Maggots introduced into the vitrine feed off the cow and then develop into flies that are killed by the electrocutor.
Amonium Biborate (1993)
Away from the Flock (1994), composed of a dead sheep in a glass tank of formaldehyde.
Arachidic Acid (1994) an early example of Hirst's spot paintings.
Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything (1996) multiple cows in a line head-to-tail, divided cross-sectionally into equal rectangular tanks of formaldehyde, equally-spaced, each containing about 3 feet (0.91 m) of the animals.
Beautiful Axe , Slash, Gosh Painting (1999) Signed on the reverse. Gloss household paint on canvas
Hymn (1999), a scaled-up replica of his son Connor's toy: a basic anatomical model of the male human body. The sculpture is 20 ft (6.1 m) tall and composed of painted bronze.
Mother and Child Divided, composed of a cow and a calf sliced in half in a glass tank of formaldehyde.
Two Fucking and Two Watching, includes a rotting cow and bull. This work was banned from exhibition in New York by public health officials.
God, composed of a cabinet containing pharmaceutical products.
The Stations of the Cross (2004), a series of twelve photographs depicting the final moments of Jesus Christ, made in collaboration with the photographer David Bailey.
The Virgin Mother, a massive sculpture depicting a pregnant female human, with layers removed from one side to expose the fœtus, muscle and tissue layers, and skull underneath. This work was purchased by real estate magnate Aby Rosen for display on the plaza of one of his properties, the Lever House, in New York City.
Breath (2001), a 45-second film of Samuel Beckett's play for the Beckett on Film series.
The Wrath of God (2005), a new version of a shark in formaldehyde.
The Inescapable Truth, (2005). Glass, steel, dove, human skull and formaldehyde solution.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus, (2005). Perspex, bull's heart, silver, assorted needles, scalpels, and formaldehyde solution.
Faithless, (2005). Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
The Hat Makes de Man, (2005). Painted bronze that simulates wood and hats.
The Death of God, (2006). Household gloss on canvas, human skull, knife, coin and sea shells. This painting, which is a part of a group of others which were made in Mexico, are believed to be "the beginning of Hirst's Mexican period".
For The Love of God, a platinum cast of an 18th century skull covered in 8,601 diamonds.[38]
Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain, a black calf tied to a pole pierced with arrows. The calf is in a tank of formaldehyde. Performer George Michael has recently purchased this calf and has made it Hirst's fourth most expensive piece.
[edit] See also
Art of the United Kingdom
Freeze
Sensation
Toddington Manor
Appropriation (art)
Tracey Emin
Neo-conceptual art
Conceptual art
Spin art
[edit] Notes and references
^ Alberge, Dalya (2007) "Pills lift Hirst to top of art world's most expensive list", The Times, 22 June 2007. Retrieved 22 June 2007.
^ Damien Hirst skull sells for $122 million
^ a b c d e "Shockaholic" on BBC site Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ a b c d e f g h "I Knew It Was Time to Clean up My Act" Daily Telegraph, July 26, 2004 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ a b Hirst, Damien and Burn, Gordon (2001). On the Way to Work. Faber
^ The Freeze catalogue 1988
^ "Saatchi mulls £6.25m shark offer", BBC. Retrieved 23 February 2007
^ The Guardian October 6, 2001 Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ a b c d "Hirst Pays up in Toy Row" on BBC site Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ "Charles Saatchi Could Have Bought Four Davids for the Price of Tracey Emin's Bed" The Daily Telegraph, January 7, 2006 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ Transcript of Hirst's 9/11 comments Retrieved March 26, 2006
^ "Hirst apologies for 11 Sept Comments" BBC website Retrieved March 26, 2006
^ a b "Hirst Buys His Art back from Saatchi", The Guardian, November 27, 2003 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ "Holy Cow! Hirst Turns to Religion" The Daily Telegraph, September 9, 2003 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ "Damien Bares His Soul" The Daily Telegraph September 10, 2003 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ Larry Gagosian website
^ Hugo Swire web site Retrieved February 18, 2006
^ Science Photo Library press release, March 15, 2005 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ Gagosian Gallery Retrieved December 27, 2006
^ a b "Damien Hirst skull sells for 100 million dollars", yahoo.com
^ Thornton, Sarah & Adam, Georgina (May 04, 2008), "Revealed: $72.8m Rockefeller Rothko has gone to Qatar", The Art Newspaper,
^ "Avoiding the sharks" Guardian Unlimited, February 14, 1999 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ The New York Times
^ The Art Newspaper
^ Dallas News
^ a b c Alberge, Dalya. "Spot the difference as artist accuses Hirst of copying", The Times, 14 August 2003. Retrieved 8 February 2008.
^ a b c Alberge, Dalya. "My old friend Damien stole my skull idea", The Times, 27 June 2007. Retrieved 10 December 2007.
^ Gleadell, Colin. "Market news: Sotheby's, Jamie Reid, Rachel Howard and more...", Daily Telegraph, 30 January 2007. Retrieved 10 January 2008.
^ a b For Hirst, Channel 4 Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ The Independent on Sunday March 12, 2005 Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ Art Newspaper interview on Saatchi Gallery site Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ Against Hirst, Channel 4 Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ a b Against Hirst, Channel 4 Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ Stuckist anti-Britart manifesto, August 4, 1999 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ Alberge, Dalya. "Traditionalists mark shark attack on Hirst", The Times, 10 April 2003. Retrieved 6 February 2008.
^ "A Dead Shark Isn't Art" on the Stuckism International web site Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ Laplaca on artnet.com
^ "Hirst unveils £50m diamond skull", BBC, 1 June 2007. Retrieved 1 June 2007.
[edit] External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Damien HirstOfficial Damien Hirst Website
frieze review of Hirst's For the Love of God
Life and death and Damien Hirst Channel 4 TV micro site
Artist's profile at White Cube, including examples of work
Gordon Burn and Damien Hirst in conversation
Video of Hirst's 9/11 comments on BBC
Damien Hirst's Pharmacy on Tate interactive site
The Joe Strummer Foundation for New Music
11 The Quay restaurant
Hirst's Shark Tank by the Little Artists
otherCRITERIA - Damien Hirst's publishing company
Damien Hirst at Gagosian Gallery
Plagiarism claims
An article on a pathology book, from which Hirst got many of his ideas
Ed Pilkington, An uneasy scene in classroom as Hirst unveils latest work, The Guardian, 10 November 2007
[hide]v • d • eYoung British Artists
Artists Steven Adamson · Fiona Banner · Christine Borland · Angela Bulloch · Simon Callery · Jake and Dinos Chapman · Adam Chodzko · Mat Collishaw · Ian Davenport · Tracey Emin · Angus Fairhurst · Anya Gallaccio · Liam Gillick · Douglas Gordon · Marcus Harvey · Damien Hirst · Gary Hume · Michael Landy · Abigail Lane · Steve McQueen · Lala Meredith-Vula · Chris Ofili · Sarah Lucas · Martin Maloney · Stephen Park · Cornelia Parker · Richard Patterson · Simon Patterson · Marc Quinn · Fiona Rae · Jenny Saville · Yinka Shonibare · Georgina Starr · Sam Taylor-Wood · Gavin Turk · Gillian Wearing · Mark Wallinger · Rachel Whiteread · Wilson Sisters
Related artists Post-YBAs · Bob & Roberta Smith · Martin Creed · Mark McGowan · Mike Nelson (artist)
Artworks Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 · For the Love of God · My Bed · State Britain · The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living · The Upper Room
Shows Freeze · Sensation
Curators Joshua Compston · Carl Freedman · Norman Rosenthal · Charles Saatchi · Jon Thompson
Galleries Anthony d'Offay · Curtain Road Arts · City Racing · Gagosian Gallery · Karsten Schubert · Lisson Gallery · Maureen Paley · Saatchi Gallery · Sadie Coles · South London Gallery · Victoria Miro Gallery · White Cube
Advocates Louisa Buck · Matthew Collings · Richard Cork · Michael Craig-Martin · Sarah Kent · Norman Rosenthal · Sir Nicholas Serota
Opponents Billy Childish · David Lee · Brian Sewell · Stuckists · Charles Thomson
See also Conceptual art · Frieze Art Fair · Turner Prize · Momart
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Damien Hirst
Born 7 June 1965
Bristol, England
Nationality British
Field Conceptual art, installation art, painting
Training Leeds College of Art and Design, Goldsmiths
Movement Young British Artists
Works The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, For the Love of God
Patrons Charles Saatchi
Awards Turner Prize
Damien Hirst (born June 7, 1965) is an English artist and the most prominent of the group that has been dubbed "Young British Artists" (or YBAs). Hirst dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s and is internationally renowned. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
Death is a central theme in Hirst's works. He became famous for a series in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. His most iconic work is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine. Its sale in 2004 made him the world's second most expensive living artist after Jasper Johns. In June 2007, Hirst overtook Johns when his Lullaby Spring sold for £9.65 million at Sotheby's in London.[1] On 30 August 2007, Hirst outdid his previous sale of Lullaby Spring with For The Love of God which sold for £50 million to an unknown investment group. [2] He is also known for "spin paintings," made on a spinning circular surface, and "spot paintings," which are rows of randomly-coloured circles.
Contents [hide]
1 Life
2 Career
2.1 Breakthrough 1988–1991
2.2 "Saatchi years" 1991–2003
2.3 Post-Saatchi, 2004–
3 Work philosophy
3.1 Appropriation
3.2 Assistants
4 Critical response
4.1 For
4.2 Against
5 Hirst's own collection
6 Restaurant ventures
7 Artworks
8 See also
9 Notes and references
10 External links
[edit] Life
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. His father was a motor mechanic, who left the family when Hirst was 12.[3] His mother, Mary, was a lapsed Catholic, who worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau and says she lost control of him when he was young.[3] He was arrested on two occasions for shoplifting.[3] However, Hirst sees her as someone who would not tolerate rebellion: she cut up his bondage trousers and heated one of his Sex Pistols vinyl records on the cooker to turn it into a fruit bowl. He says, "If she didn't like how I was dressed, she would quickly take me away from the bus stop." She did, though, encourage his liking for drawing, which was his only successful educational subject.[4]
His art teacher "pleaded"[4] for Hirst to be allowed to enter the sixth form,[4] where he took two A-levels, achieving an "E" grade in art.[3] He went to Leeds College of Art and Design, although the first time he applied he was refused admission. He worked for two years on London building sites, then studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London[3] (1986–89), although again he was refused a place the first time he applied. While a student, Hirst had a placement at a mortuary, an experience that influenced his later themes and materials.
Hirst has admitted serious drug and alcohol problems during a ten year period from the early 1990s: "I started taking cocaine and drink ... I turned into a babbling fucking wreck."[5] During this time he was renowned for his wild behaviour and extrovert acts, including for example, putting a cigarette in the end of his penis in front of journalists. He was an habitué of the high profile Groucho Club in Soho, London, and was banned on occasion for his behavior.
In 2002 Hirst gave up smoking and drinking, although the short-term result was that his wife Maia "had to move out because I was so horrible." He had met Joe Strummer (former lead singer of The Clash) at Glastonbury in 1995, becoming good friends and going on annual family holidays with him. Just before Christmas 2002, Strummer died of a heart attack. This had a profound effect on Hirst, who said, "It was the first time I felt mortal." He subsequently devoted a lot of time to founding a charity, Strummerville, to help young musicians.[4]
He is married to a Californian, Maia Norman, and has three sons, Connor, born in 1995, Cassius, born in 2000 and Cyrus born in 2007. Since the birth of Connor, he has spent most of his time at his remote farmhouse, a 300 year old former inn, in north Devon.
[edit] Career
[edit] Breakthrough 1988–1991
In July 1988 in his second year at Goldsmiths College, Hirst was the main organiser of an independent student exhibition, Freeze, in a disused London Port Authority administrative block in London's Docklands. He gained sponsorship from the London Docklands Development Corporation. The show was visited by Charles Saatchi, Norman Rosenthal and (Sir) Nicholas Serota, thanks to the influence of Goldsmiths' lecturer Michael Craig-Martin. Hirst's own contribution to the show consisted of a cluster of cardboard boxes painted with household paint.[6]
After graduating, Hirst was included in New Contemporaries show and in a group show at Kettles Yard Gallery in Cambridge. Seeking a gallery dealer, he first approached Karsten Schubert, but was turned down.
In 1990 Hirst, along with his friend Carl Freedman and Billee Sellman, curated two influential "warehouse" shows, Modern Medicine and Gambler, in a Bermondsey former factory they designated "Building One." Saatchi arrived at the second show in a green Rolls Royce and, according to Freedman, stood open-mouthed with astonishment in front of (and then bought) Hirst's first major "animal" installation, A Thousand Years, consisting of a large glass case containing maggots and flies feeding off a rotting cow's head.
Hirst first gained general public notoriety that same year when one of his works was featured as a send-up in a British tabloid newspaper.
In 1991 his first solo exhibition, organised by Tamara Chodzko - Dial, In and Out of Love, was held in an unused shop on Woodstock Street in central London; he also had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in Paris. The Serpentine Gallery presented the first survey of the new generation of artists with the exhibition Broken English, in part curated by Hirst.
At this time Hirst met the up-and-coming art dealer Jay Jopling who has continued to represent him.
[edit] "Saatchi years" 1991–2003
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst (1991)Saatchi had offered to fund whatever artwork Hirst wanted to make, and the result was showcased in 1992 in the first Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in North London. Hirst's work was titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and was a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine. It cost Saatchi £50,000. The shark had been caught by a commissioned fisherman in Australia and had cost £6,000.[7] The exhibition also included A Thousand Years. As a result of the show, Hirst was nominated for that year's Turner Prize, but it was awarded to Grenville Davey.
In 1993, Hirst's first major international presentation was in the Venice Biennale with the work, Mother and Child Divided, a cow and a calf cut into sections and exhibited in a series of separate vitrines. He curated the show Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away in 1994 at the Serpentine Gallery in London, where he exhibited Away from the Flock (a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde). On 9 May, Mark Bridger, a 35 year old artist from Oxford, poured black ink into it, and retitled the work Black Sheep. He was subsequently prosecuted, at Hirst's wish, and was given two years' probation. The sculpture was restored at a cost of £1,000.
In 1995, Hirst won the Turner Prize. New York public health officials banned Two Fucking and Two Watching featuring a rotting cow and bull, because of fears of "vomiting among the visitors". There were solo shows in Seoul, London and Salzburg. He directed the video for the song "Country House" for the band Blur. No Sense of Absolute Corruption, his first solo show in the Gagosian Gallery in New York was staged the following year. In London the short film, Hanging Around, was shown—written and directed by Hirst and starring Eddie Izzard. In 1997 the Sensation exhibition opened at the Royal Academy in London. A Thousand Years and other works by Hirst were included, but the main controversy occurred over other artists' works. It was nevertheless seen as the formal acceptance of the YBAs into the establishment.
Beautiful revolving sphincter, oops brown painting by Damien HirstIn 1998, his critically-acclaimed autobiography/art book, I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, was published. With Alex James of the band Blur and actor Keith Allen, he formed the band Fat Les, achieving a number 2 hit with a raucous football-themed song Vindaloo, followed up by Jerusalem with the London Gay Men's Chorus. Hirst also painted a simple colour pattern for the Beagle 2 probe. This pattern was to be used to calibrate the probe's cameras after it had landed on Mars. He turned down the British Council's invitation to be Britain's representative at the 1999 Venice Biennale because "it didn't feel right".[8] He sued British Airways claiming a breach of copyright over an advert design with coloured spots for its low budget airline, Go.
In 2000, Hirst's sculpture Hymn (which Saatchi had bought for a reported £1m) was given pole position at the show Ant Noises (an anagram of "sensation") in the Saatchi Gallery. Hirst was then sued himself for breach of copyright over this sculpture (see Appropriation below).[9] Hirst sold three more copies of his sculpture for similar amounts to the first.[10] In September 2000, in New York, Larry Gagosian held the Hirst show, Damien Hirst: Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings. 100,000 people visited the show in 12 weeks and all the work was sold.
On September 10, 2002, on the eve of the first anniversary of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, Hirst said in an interview with BBC News Online:
The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of like an artwork in its own right ... Of course, it's visually stunning and you've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible - especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing."[11] The next week, following public outrage at his remarks, he issued a statement through his company, Science Ltd:
I apologise unreservedly for any upset I have caused, particularly to the families of the victims of the events on that terrible day."[12]
In April 2003, the Saatchi Gallery opened at new premises in County Hall, London, with a show that included a Hirst retrospective. This brought a developing strain in his relationship with Saatchi to a head (one source of contention had been who was most responsible for boosting their mutual profile). Hirst disassociated himself from the retrospective to the extent of not including it in his CV. He was angry that a Mini car that he had decorated for charity with his trademark spots was being exhibited as a serious artwork. The show also scuppered a prospective Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern. He said Saatchi was "childish"[4] and "I'm not Charles Saatchi's barrel-organ monkey ... He only recognises art with his wallet ... he believes he can affect art values with buying power, and he still believes he can do it."[13]
In September 2003 he had an exhibition Romance in the Age of Uncertainty at Jay Jopling's White Cube gallery in London, which made him a reported £11m,[4] bringing his wealth to over £35m. It was reported that a sculpture, Charity, had been sold for £1.5m to a Korean, Kim Chang-Il, who intended to exhibit it in his department store's gallery in Seoul.[14] The 22 foot (6.7m) 6 ton sculpture was based on the 1960s Spastic Society's model, which is of a girl in leg irons holding a collecting box. In Hirst's version the collecting box is shown broken open and is empty.
Charity was exhibited in the centre of Hoxton Square, in front of the White Cube. Inside the gallery downstairs were 12 vitrines representing Jesus's disciples, each case containing mostly gruesome, often blood-stained, items relevant to the particular disciple. At the end was an empty vitrine, representing Christ. Upstairs were four small glass cases, each containing a cow's head stuck with scissors and knives. It has been described as an "extraordinarily spiritual experience" in the tradition of Catholic imagery.[15] At this time Hirst bought back 12 works from Saatchi (a third of Saatchi's holdings of Hirst's early works), via Jay Jopling, for a total fee reported to exceed £8 million. Hirst had sold these pieces to Saatchi in the early 1990s for a considerably smaller sum, his first installations costing less than £10,000.[13]
[edit] Post-Saatchi, 2004–
Virgin Mother by Damien HirstOn May 24, 2004, a fire in the Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including 17 of Hirst's, although the sculpture Charity survived, as it was outside in the builder's yard.
In July 2004 Hirst commented about Saatchi, "I respect Charles. There's not really a feud. If I see him, we speak, but we were never really drinking buddies."[4]
In late 2004, Hirst designed a cover for the Band Aid 20 charity single featuring the "Grim Reaper" with an African child perched on his knee. This was not to the liking of the record company executives and was replaced by reindeer in the snow standing next to a child.
In December 2004, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was sold by Saatchi to American collector Steve Cohen, for $12 million (£6.5 million), in a deal negotiated by Hirst's New York agent, Gagosian.[16] Cohen, a Greenwich hedge fund manager, then donated the work to MoMA, New York. Sir Nicholas Serota had wanted to acquire it for the Tate Gallery, and Hugo Swire, Shadow Minister for the Arts, tabled a question to ask if the government would ensure it stayed in the country.[17] Current export regulations do not apply to living artists.
In March 2005, Hirst exhibited 30 paintings at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. These had taken 3 1/2 years to complete. They were closely based on photos, mostly by assistants (who were rotated between paintings) but with a final finish by Hirst.[18]
In February 2006, Hirst opened a major show in Mexico, at the Hilario Galguera Gallery, called The Death of God, Towards a Better Understanding of Life without God aboard The Ship of Fools. The exhibition attracted considerable media coverage as Hirst's first show in Latin America.
In June 2006 Hirst exhibited alongside the work of Francis Bacon (Triptychs) at the Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London. Included in the exhibition was the seminal vitrine, A Thousand Years (1990), and four triptychs: paintings, medicine cabinets and a new formaldehyde work entitled The Tranquility of Solitude (For George Dyer), influenced by Francis Bacon.
For the Love of God by Damien Hirst (2007)A Thousand Years, one of Hirst's most provocative and engaging works, contains an actual life cycle. Maggots hatch inside a white minimal box, turn into flies, then feed on a bloody, severed cow's head on the floor of a claustrophobic glass vitrine. Above, hatched flies buzz around in the closed space. Many meet a violent end in an insect-o-cutor; others survive to continue the cycle. A Thousand Years was admired by Francis Bacon, who in a letter to a friend a month before he died, wrote about the experience of seeing the work at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Margarita Coppack notes that "It is as if Bacon, a painter with no direct heir in that medium, was handing the baton on to a new generation." Hirst has openly acknowledged his debt to Bacon, absorbing the painter's visceral images and obsessions early on and giving them concrete existence in sculptural form with works like A Thousand Years.[19]
In May 2007, Beyond Belief, an exhibition of Hirst's new work, opened at the White Cube gallery in London. The centre-piece, a Memento Mori titled For The Love of God, was a human skull recreated in platinum and adorned with 8,601 diamonds weighing a total of 1,106.18 carats. Approximately £15,000,000 worth of diamonds were used. It was modelled on an 18th century skull, but the only surviving human part of the original is the teeth.[20]
In June 2007, Hirst gained the auction record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist — his Lullaby Spring, a 3 metre (10 ft) wide steel cabinet with 6,136 pills, sold for 19.2 million dollars to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar.[21]
On August 30, 2007, For the Love of God was sold for £50,000,000 (100 million dollars or 75 million euros).[20]
[edit] Work philosophy
Although Hirst participated physically in the making of early works, he has always needed assistants (Carl Freedman helped with the first vitrines), and now the volume of work produced necessitates a "factory" setup, akin to Andy Warhol's or a Renaissance studio. This has led to questions about authenticity, as was highlighted in 1997, when a spin painting that Hirst said was a "forgery" appeared at sale, although he had previously said that he often had nothing to do with the creation of these pieces.
LSD by Damien HirstHirst said that he only painted five spot paintings himself because, "I couldn't be fucking arsed doing it"; he described his efforts as "shite"—"They're shit compared to ... the best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel. She's brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel." He also describes another painting assistant who was leaving and asked for one of the paintings. Hirst told her to, "'make one of your own.' And she said, 'No, I want one of yours.' But the only difference, between one painted by her and one of mine, is the money.'"[5] By February 1999, two assistants had painted 300 spot paintings.[22]
Hirst sees the real creative act as being the conception, not the execution, and that, as the progenitor of the idea, he is therefore the artist:
“ Art goes on in your head," he says. "If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down. Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings. There are on-going ideas I've been working out for years, like how to make a rainbow in a gallery. I've always got a massive list of titles, of ideas for shows, and of works without titles. ”
Hirst is also known to volunteer repair work on his projects after a client has made a purchase. For example, this service was offered in the case of the suspended shark purchased by Steven A. Cohen.[23][24][25]
[edit] Appropriation
In 1999, chef Marco Pierre White said Hirst's Butterflies On Mars had plagiarised his own work, Rising Sun, which he then put on display in the restaurant Quo Vadis in place of the Hirst work.[26]
In 2000, Hirst was sued for breach of copyright over his sculpture, Hymn, which was a 20-foot (6.1 m), six ton, enlargement of his son Connor's 14" Young Scientist Anatomy Set, designed by Norman Emms, 10,000 of which are sold a year by Hull-based toy manufacturer Humbrol for £14.99 each.[9] Hirst paid an undisclosed sum to two charities, Children Nationwide and the Toy Trust in an out-of-court settlement,[9] as well as a "good will payment" to Emms.[26] The charitable donation was less than Emms had hoped for. Hirst also agreed to restrictions on further reproductions of his sculpture.[9]
Spiritus Callidus #2 by John Lekay, 1993, crystal skullIn 2006, a graphic artist and former research associate at the Royal College of Art, Robert Dixon, stated Hirst's print Valium had "unmistakable similarities" to one of his own designs. Hirst's manager contested this by explaining the origin of Hirst's piece was from a book The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry (1991)—not realising this was where Dixon's design had been published.[27][26]
In 2007, artist John LeKay said he was a friend of Damien Hirst 1992–1994 and had given him a "marked-up duplicate copy" of a Carolina Biological Supply Company catalogue, adding "You have no idea how much he got from this catalogue. The Cow Divided is on page 647 – it is a model of a cow divided down the centre, like his piece." This refers to Hirst’s work Mother and Child, Divided—a cow and calf cut in half and placed in formaldehyde.[27] LeKay also claimed Hirst had copied the idea of For the Love of God from LeKay's crystal skulls made in 1993, and said, "I would like Damien to acknowledge that 'John really did inspire the skull and influenced my work a lot.'"[27]
[edit] Assistants
Artists who have worked as assistants for Hirst include Rachel Howard.[28]
[edit] Critical response
[edit] For
Hirst has been praised in recognition of his celebrity and the way this has galvanised interest in the arts, raising the profile of British art and helping to (re)create the image of "Cool Britannia". In the mid-1990s, the then-Heritage Secretary, Virginia Bottomley recognised him as "a pioneer of the British art movement", and even sheep farmers were pleased he had raised increased interest in British lamb. Andres Serrano is also known for shocking work and understands that contemporary fame does not necessarily equate to lasting fame, but backs Hirst: "Damien is very clever ... First you get the attention ... Whether or not it will stand the test of time, I don't know, but I think it will." Sir Nicholas Serota commented, "Damien is something of a showman ... It is very difficult to be an artist when there is huge public and media attention. Because Damien Hirst has been built up as a very important figure, there are plenty of sceptics ready to put the knife in."[29] Tracey Emin said: "There is no comparison between him and me; he developed a whole new way of making art and he's clearly in a league of his own. It would be like making comparisons with Warhol."[30] Despite Hirst's insults to him, Saatchi remains a staunch supporter, labelling Hirst a genius[29] and stating:
“ General art books dated 2105 will be as brutal about editing the late 20th century as they are about almost all other centuries. Every artist other than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Damien Hirst will be a footnote.[31] ”
[edit] Against
A Dead Shark Isn't Art, Stuckism International Gallery 2003There has been equally vehement opposition to Hirst's work. Norman Tebbit commenting on the Sensation exhibition, wrote "Have they gone stark raving mad? The works of the 'artist' are lumps of dead animals. There are thousands of young artists who didn't get a look in, presumably because their work was too attractive to sane people. Modern art experts never learn."[32] The view of the tabloid press is summed up by a Daily Mail headline: "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all." The Evening Standard art critic, Brian Sewell, said simply, "I don't think of it as art ... It is no more interesting than a stuffed pike over a pub door. Indeed there may well be more art in a stuffed pike than a dead sheep."[33] The Stuckist art group was founded in 1999 with a specific anti-Britart agenda by Charles Thomson (artist) and Billy Childish;[34] Hirst is one of their main targets. They wrote (referring to a Channel 4 programme on Hirst):
“ The fact that Hirst's work does mirror society is not its strength but its weakness - and the reason it is guaranteed to decline artistically (and financially) as current social modes become outmoded. What Hirst has insightfully observed of his spin-paintings in Life and Death and Damien Hirst is the only comment that needs to be made of his entire oeuvre: "They're bright and they're zany - but there's fuck all there at the end of the day."[33] ”
In 2003, under the title A Dead Shark Isn't Art, the Stuckism International Gallery exhibited a shark which had first been put on public display two years before Hirst's by Eddie Saunders in his Shoreditch shop, JD Electrical Supplies. Thomson asked, "If Hirst’s shark is recognised as great art, then how come Eddie’s, which was on exhibition for two years beforehand, isn’t? Do we perhaps have here an undiscovered artist of genius, who got there first, or is it that a dead shark isn’t art at all?" [35] The Stuckists suggested that Hirst may have gotten the idea for his work from Saunders' shop display.[36]
[edit] Hirst's own collection
In November 2006 Hirst was curator of In the darkest hour there may be light, the first public exhibition of (a small part of) his own collection. Now known as the ‘murderme collection’, this significant accumulation of works spans several generations of international artists, from well-known figures such as Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, Tracey Emin, Richard Prince and Andy Warhol, to artists in earlier stages of their careers like Rachel Howard, Nicholas Lumb and Tom Ormond.
“As a human being, as you go through life, you just do collect. It was that sort of entropic collecting that I found myself interested in, just amassing stuff while you’re alive.” - Damien Hirst, 2006.
Hirst is currently restoring the Grade I listed Toddington Manor, near Cheltenham, where he intends to eventually house the complete collection.
In 2007, Hirst donated the 1991 sculptures "The Acquired Inability to Escape" and "Life Without You" and the 2002 work "Who is Afraid of the Dark?" (fly painting), and an exhibition copy from 2007 of "Mother and Child Divided" to the Tate Museum from his own personal collection of works.
[edit] Restaurant ventures
Hirst had a short-lived partnership with chef Marco Pierre White in the restaurant Quo Vadis.
Hirst's best known restaurant involvement was Pharmacy, located in Notting Hill, London, which closed in September 2003. Although one of the owners, Hirst had only leased his art work to the restaurant, so he was able to retrieve and sell it at a Sotheby's auction, earning over £11 million. Some of the work had been adapted, e.g. by signing it prior to the auction.[37].
Hirst opened and currently helps to run a seafood restaurant, 11 The Quay, in the seaside town of Ilfracombe in the UK.
[edit] Artworks
His works include:
In and Out of Love (1991), an installation of potted plants, caterpillars and monochrome canvases painted with sugar solution and glue. There were also (in a separate room) tables with ashtrays containing used cigarette butts. Eventually, the caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies, and the insects become fixed to the surfaces of the canvases. In its now fixed form, the work is held by the Yale Center for British Art and is on regular exhibit there.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. This piece was one of the works in his Turner Prize nomination show.
Pharmacy(1992), a life-size recreation of a chemist's shop.
A Thousand Years (1991), composed of a vitrine with a glass division. In one half is the severed head of a cow on the floor; in the other is an insect electrocutor. Maggots introduced into the vitrine feed off the cow and then develop into flies that are killed by the electrocutor.
Amonium Biborate (1993)
Away from the Flock (1994), composed of a dead sheep in a glass tank of formaldehyde.
Arachidic Acid (1994) an early example of Hirst's spot paintings.
Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything (1996) multiple cows in a line head-to-tail, divided cross-sectionally into equal rectangular tanks of formaldehyde, equally-spaced, each containing about 3 feet (0.91 m) of the animals.
Beautiful Axe , Slash, Gosh Painting (1999) Signed on the reverse. Gloss household paint on canvas
Hymn (1999), a scaled-up replica of his son Connor's toy: a basic anatomical model of the male human body. The sculpture is 20 ft (6.1 m) tall and composed of painted bronze.
Mother and Child Divided, composed of a cow and a calf sliced in half in a glass tank of formaldehyde.
Two Fucking and Two Watching, includes a rotting cow and bull. This work was banned from exhibition in New York by public health officials.
God, composed of a cabinet containing pharmaceutical products.
The Stations of the Cross (2004), a series of twelve photographs depicting the final moments of Jesus Christ, made in collaboration with the photographer David Bailey.
The Virgin Mother, a massive sculpture depicting a pregnant female human, with layers removed from one side to expose the fœtus, muscle and tissue layers, and skull underneath. This work was purchased by real estate magnate Aby Rosen for display on the plaza of one of his properties, the Lever House, in New York City.
Breath (2001), a 45-second film of Samuel Beckett's play for the Beckett on Film series.
The Wrath of God (2005), a new version of a shark in formaldehyde.
The Inescapable Truth, (2005). Glass, steel, dove, human skull and formaldehyde solution.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus, (2005). Perspex, bull's heart, silver, assorted needles, scalpels, and formaldehyde solution.
Faithless, (2005). Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
The Hat Makes de Man, (2005). Painted bronze that simulates wood and hats.
The Death of God, (2006). Household gloss on canvas, human skull, knife, coin and sea shells. This painting, which is a part of a group of others which were made in Mexico, are believed to be "the beginning of Hirst's Mexican period".
For The Love of God, a platinum cast of an 18th century skull covered in 8,601 diamonds.[38]
Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain, a black calf tied to a pole pierced with arrows. The calf is in a tank of formaldehyde. Performer George Michael has recently purchased this calf and has made it Hirst's fourth most expensive piece.
[edit] See also
Art of the United Kingdom
Freeze
Sensation
Toddington Manor
Appropriation (art)
Tracey Emin
Neo-conceptual art
Conceptual art
Spin art
[edit] Notes and references
^ Alberge, Dalya (2007) "Pills lift Hirst to top of art world's most expensive list", The Times, 22 June 2007. Retrieved 22 June 2007.
^ Damien Hirst skull sells for $122 million
^ a b c d e "Shockaholic" on BBC site Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ a b c d e f g h "I Knew It Was Time to Clean up My Act" Daily Telegraph, July 26, 2004 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ a b Hirst, Damien and Burn, Gordon (2001). On the Way to Work. Faber
^ The Freeze catalogue 1988
^ "Saatchi mulls £6.25m shark offer", BBC. Retrieved 23 February 2007
^ The Guardian October 6, 2001 Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ a b c d "Hirst Pays up in Toy Row" on BBC site Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ "Charles Saatchi Could Have Bought Four Davids for the Price of Tracey Emin's Bed" The Daily Telegraph, January 7, 2006 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ Transcript of Hirst's 9/11 comments Retrieved March 26, 2006
^ "Hirst apologies for 11 Sept Comments" BBC website Retrieved March 26, 2006
^ a b "Hirst Buys His Art back from Saatchi", The Guardian, November 27, 2003 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ "Holy Cow! Hirst Turns to Religion" The Daily Telegraph, September 9, 2003 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ "Damien Bares His Soul" The Daily Telegraph September 10, 2003 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ Larry Gagosian website
^ Hugo Swire web site Retrieved February 18, 2006
^ Science Photo Library press release, March 15, 2005 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ Gagosian Gallery Retrieved December 27, 2006
^ a b "Damien Hirst skull sells for 100 million dollars", yahoo.com
^ Thornton, Sarah & Adam, Georgina (May 04, 2008), "Revealed: $72.8m Rockefeller Rothko has gone to Qatar", The Art Newspaper,
^ "Avoiding the sharks" Guardian Unlimited, February 14, 1999 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ The New York Times
^ The Art Newspaper
^ Dallas News
^ a b c Alberge, Dalya. "Spot the difference as artist accuses Hirst of copying", The Times, 14 August 2003. Retrieved 8 February 2008.
^ a b c Alberge, Dalya. "My old friend Damien stole my skull idea", The Times, 27 June 2007. Retrieved 10 December 2007.
^ Gleadell, Colin. "Market news: Sotheby's, Jamie Reid, Rachel Howard and more...", Daily Telegraph, 30 January 2007. Retrieved 10 January 2008.
^ a b For Hirst, Channel 4 Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ The Independent on Sunday March 12, 2005 Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ Art Newspaper interview on Saatchi Gallery site Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ Against Hirst, Channel 4 Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ a b Against Hirst, Channel 4 Retrieved March 19, 2006
^ Stuckist anti-Britart manifesto, August 4, 1999 Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ Alberge, Dalya. "Traditionalists mark shark attack on Hirst", The Times, 10 April 2003. Retrieved 6 February 2008.
^ "A Dead Shark Isn't Art" on the Stuckism International web site Retrieved March 20, 2006
^ Laplaca on artnet.com
^ "Hirst unveils £50m diamond skull", BBC, 1 June 2007. Retrieved 1 June 2007.
[edit] External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Damien HirstOfficial Damien Hirst Website
frieze review of Hirst's For the Love of God
Life and death and Damien Hirst Channel 4 TV micro site
Artist's profile at White Cube, including examples of work
Gordon Burn and Damien Hirst in conversation
Video of Hirst's 9/11 comments on BBC
Damien Hirst's Pharmacy on Tate interactive site
The Joe Strummer Foundation for New Music
11 The Quay restaurant
Hirst's Shark Tank by the Little Artists
otherCRITERIA - Damien Hirst's publishing company
Damien Hirst at Gagosian Gallery
Plagiarism claims
An article on a pathology book, from which Hirst got many of his ideas
Ed Pilkington, An uneasy scene in classroom as Hirst unveils latest work, The Guardian, 10 November 2007
[hide]v • d • eYoung British Artists
Artists Steven Adamson · Fiona Banner · Christine Borland · Angela Bulloch · Simon Callery · Jake and Dinos Chapman · Adam Chodzko · Mat Collishaw · Ian Davenport · Tracey Emin · Angus Fairhurst · Anya Gallaccio · Liam Gillick · Douglas Gordon · Marcus Harvey · Damien Hirst · Gary Hume · Michael Landy · Abigail Lane · Steve McQueen · Lala Meredith-Vula · Chris Ofili · Sarah Lucas · Martin Maloney · Stephen Park · Cornelia Parker · Richard Patterson · Simon Patterson · Marc Quinn · Fiona Rae · Jenny Saville · Yinka Shonibare · Georgina Starr · Sam Taylor-Wood · Gavin Turk · Gillian Wearing · Mark Wallinger · Rachel Whiteread · Wilson Sisters
Related artists Post-YBAs · Bob & Roberta Smith · Martin Creed · Mark McGowan · Mike Nelson (artist)
Artworks Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 · For the Love of God · My Bed · State Britain · The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living · The Upper Room
Shows Freeze · Sensation
Curators Joshua Compston · Carl Freedman · Norman Rosenthal · Charles Saatchi · Jon Thompson
Galleries Anthony d'Offay · Curtain Road Arts · City Racing · Gagosian Gallery · Karsten Schubert · Lisson Gallery · Maureen Paley · Saatchi Gallery · Sadie Coles · South London Gallery · Victoria Miro Gallery · White Cube
Advocates Louisa Buck · Matthew Collings · Richard Cork · Michael Craig-Martin · Sarah Kent · Norman Rosenthal · Sir Nicholas Serota
Opponents Billy Childish · David Lee · Brian Sewell · Stuckists · Charles Thomson
See also Conceptual art · Frieze Art Fair · Turner Prize · Momart
Tracey emin again
Twenty years of Tracey EminHighs and lows of bra, bed, and blankets: but is it all a bit too much?
Charlotte Higgins in Edinburgh The Guardian, Saturday August 2 2008 Article history
Tracey Emin poses by You forgot to kiss my soul! 2001, at the first major UK retrospective of her work. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
As you walk through the doors of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, there's Tracey from the waist down, blown up to 20ft and plastered on the wall, naked but for a pair of black knickers, a pinny, and a paintbrush.
Wander a little further in and, look, there's Tracey as a baby, Tracey's granny, and Tracey's uncle Colin, who died, as the newspaper cutting puts it, in a "horror crash". There are Tracey's endless attempts to recover her turbulent past - her teenage sex, her abortion, the time in 1988 when she stood outside the Royal College of Art, London, and smashed up every single painting she'd made as a student with a sledgehammer.
Here is her bra, her jewellery, her underwear; is that - oh - a pessary, even? Here, too, is that infamous bed: her tampons, her used condoms, the nameless stains from her body on the sheets. Every few minutes, wherever you are in the exhibition - her first full retrospective in Britain - you can even hear her voice, screaming like a banshee, in homage to Munch's masterpiece. Emin says of the preparations for the exhibition: "By Wednesday this week I couldn't stand to see my face or hear my voice. I opened a paper and saw my face in it and thought, ugh. I couldn't take any more of myself. And I thought, 'If I can't take me, how can anyone else?'" Which is, perhaps, the fundamental Tracey question.
By yesterday, however, Emin seemed to be over the worst of that particular attack of self-doubt. "I know that seeing so much of my work can be a very emotional experience," she said. "But the emotion's not all bad. I'm not a victim to everything. I want people to feel the highs and lows. The bed was fantastic and seminal; the tent was seminal, but there are other kinds of work. And there is a lot of hard work involved in this art. The blankets, for instance, are all really hard work and they are not all about me. This show is a chance for people to see another side of me and my work."
A case in point, perhaps, is a blanket, whose text reads: "Come unto me / Every time I feel love / I think Christ/ I'm going to be / crucified / so I close my eyes and I become the cross / so beautifull [sic]." She explains it thus: "When I'm having sex and being fucked and I disappear into the ether and it's amazing, I feel like I am being crucified; and it makes me feel of Jesus and how he is supposed to represent love. When you really feel love for someone you go to another place - and that level of ecstasy could be heaven. There's nothing blasphemous about it - it's absolutely genuine. Making love and being in love are just fantastic. It should happen more often."
If there is one major gap in this retrospective it is that tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, which was destroyed in the Momart fire of 2004.
Yesterday Emin revealed that she had been offered £1m to remake the tent, but had refused. The offer had come by way of the insurance company of collector Charles Saatchi, who owned the work at the time of its destruction. "I have never, ever done anything for the money," she said. Making the tent again, out of its time, seemed wrong. It feels needed here, to complete a circle; yet, at the same time, its absence is appropriate in an exhibition where so much of the material relates to loss, to the impossibility of memory's recovery, to an unrealisable desire to change the past.
· Tracey Emin 20 Years is at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until November 9.
Charlotte Higgins in Edinburgh The Guardian, Saturday August 2 2008 Article history
Tracey Emin poses by You forgot to kiss my soul! 2001, at the first major UK retrospective of her work. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
As you walk through the doors of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, there's Tracey from the waist down, blown up to 20ft and plastered on the wall, naked but for a pair of black knickers, a pinny, and a paintbrush.
Wander a little further in and, look, there's Tracey as a baby, Tracey's granny, and Tracey's uncle Colin, who died, as the newspaper cutting puts it, in a "horror crash". There are Tracey's endless attempts to recover her turbulent past - her teenage sex, her abortion, the time in 1988 when she stood outside the Royal College of Art, London, and smashed up every single painting she'd made as a student with a sledgehammer.
Here is her bra, her jewellery, her underwear; is that - oh - a pessary, even? Here, too, is that infamous bed: her tampons, her used condoms, the nameless stains from her body on the sheets. Every few minutes, wherever you are in the exhibition - her first full retrospective in Britain - you can even hear her voice, screaming like a banshee, in homage to Munch's masterpiece. Emin says of the preparations for the exhibition: "By Wednesday this week I couldn't stand to see my face or hear my voice. I opened a paper and saw my face in it and thought, ugh. I couldn't take any more of myself. And I thought, 'If I can't take me, how can anyone else?'" Which is, perhaps, the fundamental Tracey question.
By yesterday, however, Emin seemed to be over the worst of that particular attack of self-doubt. "I know that seeing so much of my work can be a very emotional experience," she said. "But the emotion's not all bad. I'm not a victim to everything. I want people to feel the highs and lows. The bed was fantastic and seminal; the tent was seminal, but there are other kinds of work. And there is a lot of hard work involved in this art. The blankets, for instance, are all really hard work and they are not all about me. This show is a chance for people to see another side of me and my work."
A case in point, perhaps, is a blanket, whose text reads: "Come unto me / Every time I feel love / I think Christ/ I'm going to be / crucified / so I close my eyes and I become the cross / so beautifull [sic]." She explains it thus: "When I'm having sex and being fucked and I disappear into the ether and it's amazing, I feel like I am being crucified; and it makes me feel of Jesus and how he is supposed to represent love. When you really feel love for someone you go to another place - and that level of ecstasy could be heaven. There's nothing blasphemous about it - it's absolutely genuine. Making love and being in love are just fantastic. It should happen more often."
If there is one major gap in this retrospective it is that tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, which was destroyed in the Momart fire of 2004.
Yesterday Emin revealed that she had been offered £1m to remake the tent, but had refused. The offer had come by way of the insurance company of collector Charles Saatchi, who owned the work at the time of its destruction. "I have never, ever done anything for the money," she said. Making the tent again, out of its time, seemed wrong. It feels needed here, to complete a circle; yet, at the same time, its absence is appropriate in an exhibition where so much of the material relates to loss, to the impossibility of memory's recovery, to an unrealisable desire to change the past.
· Tracey Emin 20 Years is at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until November 9.
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
money and arts
The London Contemporary Art sales gave credence to almost every view of the art market. Sotheby's held the most successful Evening sale with a total above the high estimate but Phillips de Pury failed to achieve a total equal to the low estimate. Some very prominent works did not find buyers and yet many artists achieved new records both at the high end of the price spectrum and towards the middle and low end.
The three auction houses had a mix of very positive news—and disappointments. This counterpoint cautions against a reckless view of the market and suggests the market is functioning by balancing excitement for particular works against a healthy amount of skepticism.
The wide range of results also suggests that the Contemporary art market is reaching a point of stability after several years of rapid growth. The growth pace had been so high it began to cast a question over the market as a whole: could the market increase at such a rate without becoming a bubble or susceptible to a crash? Add credit problems in the United States and the threat of a worldwide recession. Taken together, they make a good recipe for worry.
That concern has been amply voiced in the press but the results from London seem to have confirmed in even the biggest doubters that the market has a firm foundation. That foundation comes from the presence of several blue-chip artists whose work can be counted on for market leadership and a base of collectors with the means to acquire these works. The top lots in the three evening sales were works by Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, Lucien Freud, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning. All six artists have strong auction histories and the success of their work—especially fine examples of their work—can be considered evidence of a flight to quality.
Overall, 179 works changed hands in the Evening Contemporary Art sales for $409 million (including the Buyer's Premium.) The average price for a work in the Evening sales was $2.28 million. But the most telling statistic was the sell-through rate. Overall 80% of the works on offer found buyers. For Sotheby's, that figure was a remarkable 95% and one of the reasons Sotheby's had the highest total of all three houses at $189 million.
Significant Sales
Works of art by Francis Bacon have led the Contemporary art market for more than a year. In 2007, $267 million in Bacon canvases were sold during Evening auctions. Half way through 2008 that number has already reached $200 million.
Sotheby's has played an important role in the Bacon market selling 9 of the top 15 Bacon lots, including 4 of the top 5 prices.
Sotheby's Study for Head of George Dyer sold for well above the expected $16 million for nearly $27.4 million. Christie's triptych self-portrait also outperformed its $20 million target by achieving a $34 million price. Those sales amply demonstrate the continuing depth and strength of the Bacon market, especially when there were other Bacon works on offer that did not perform as well.
Richard Prince's Overseas Nurse established a new record price for the artist. The nurse paintings began their auction cycle three years ago in London when Sotheby's sold Bachelor Nurse for $484,000. Since that time, an additional 16 nurse paintings have been offered at auction with prices steadily climbing to this season's $8.4 million record.
Yves Klein's price structure was substantially re-set in New York's May sales when two canvasses from the collection of Walter and Doris Lauff were sold for $23.5 million and more than $17 million. Those may have been exceptional works but the London sales confirmed the values achieved when three works by Klein were sold for prices well above their estimates. ANT 131 made almost $8.5 million; ANT 2 went for $4.5 million; and RE 3 sold for $6.3 million.
Other important sales at Sotheby's include the record price Bridget Riley's Chant 2 attracted. At $5.1 million, Riley's work moves into the top rank of artists and confirms her unique position as the leading example of a distinct vein of abstract art.
Marlene Dumas's The Visitor surprised the market by attracting $6.3 million, close to three times the high estimate, making her the living female artist with the highest auction price. But this was not the first time Dumas's work surprised the market or won her that title. In February of 2005, Acquavella Galleries bought The Teacher (sub a) for $3.34 million, a record then for a living woman artist. The sale of The Visitor far above the high estimate revives momentum in the Dumas market.
British artists also made important sales during the Sotheby's auction. Anthony Gormley's Angel of the North received a lot of press attention for achieving a $4.5 million price that was three times the high estimate. Frank Auerbach's Head of Helen Gillespie, which made $3.8 million and was also triple the high estimate, represents a record for the artist. Auerbach is an artist who has steadily gained value in recent years despite not having attracted much press attention.
The depth of Sotheby's sale was illustrated by the strong interest in other groups of artists. Italians Alighiero e Boetti and Piero Manzoni both had works that performed beyond expectations. Despite a number of records for Manzoni's Achrome works in recent sales, one sold in London for $3.88 million that had been estimated at less than half of that figure. Boetti's Tutto also doubled the high estimate to sell for $793,000.
Like the Italians, there were several Indian artists represented in the sale. Anish Kapoor's untitled sculpture sold for $3.88 million. Subodh Gupta had five works offered across three auction houses during the London Evening sales. All but one of those five sold for above the high estimate (the fifth sold within the estimated range.) Sotheby's untitled painting was the highest value lot of the five. It sold for $1.2 million which was double the high estimate.
Significant Buyers
The regional breakdown of buyers for the London Contemporary art sales confirms the importance of London as a growing center of the global art trade. Sotheby's will exclude their clients who wish to remain anonymous from the regional data but those clients account for fewer than 10% of the buyers in the Evening sale. Although the majority of lots were purchased by Europeans, North Americans acquired 32% of the lots. A substantial minority of the lots went to buyers from the rest of the world.
Market Trends
The growth of London in the global art market is a significant trend worth exploring in detail. Sotheby's Contemporary art Evening sale was remarkable for its 95% sell-through rate. But a closer examination of the three major Contemporary art sales held in London —in February, June and October—over the last three years shows that Sotheby's June sale has consistently sold 90% or more of the lots on offer. That level of consistency is rare in the art market, especially when Sotheby's other London Evening sales have only reached the 90% sell-through level in February of 2006, a period of market acceleration.
The total of London's Contemporary art Evening sales more than doubled from 2006 to 2007. In 2006, the combined Evening sales were $125 million and in 2007 the total was $302 million. Such a rapid increase would be hard to maintain—and probably not conducive to a stable market. When we look at relative sales by comparing the increases in the February sales, Year-to-Date (YTD) Sales for June and the Full Year totals, a consistent pattern emerges. The February sales have gone from $51 million to $189 million over three years while the YTD totals have gone from $106 million to $234 million to $378 million.
In 2006, the both the February Evening sale and the June Evening sale of Contemporary art were roughly equal at a little more than $50 million for each sale. In 2008, the two sales totals again reached parity at $189 million and $188 million respectively. But in 2007, a large disparity had emerged between the two sales. From 2006 to 2007, the February sale increased 75% in value but the June sale increased 160% in the same period. These data allow us to see the crucial moment of acceleration in the London market: the Spring of 2007.
What do all of these numbers mean? The London market has been growing but it has also been consolidating its position as an important sales center for the global art market. The June sales increased 31% from 2007 to 2008. That's impressive growth, though much more manageable than the growth rate of the year before.
More important, in terms of the state of the art market, sales growth in London has not come at the expense of growth in New York. Buyers will clearly participate wherever the work that interests them appears. Success in London has built upon sales success in New York. That's very meaningful because it confirms that the overall art market is still growing in dollar terms across all sale locations.
These numbers show that the art market continues to add to its base of collectors, an important factor for future stability; and that growth has not been a product of a bubble or a short-term shift in the market as many have suggested.
The Art Market Monitor is published by Marion Maneker.
For more information, go to ArtMarketMonitor.com
Helpful Links
Auction Results
View the Catalogues
Illustrated Sold Lot Archive Departments:
Contemporary Art
Contemporary Art
Sotheby's
Sale Total with Premium 94,701,550
Total in $ $188,853,831
Total Lots 75
Lots Sold 71
% Sold 94.70%
Average Lot Value $2,659,913
Median Lot Value $1,489,368
Christie's
Sale Total with Premium 86,241,600
Total in $ $171,879,508
Total Lots 58
Lots Sold 48
% Sold 83%
Average Lot Value $3,580,823
Median Lot Value $1,805,250
Phillips de Pury
Sale Total with Premium 24,483,000
Total in $ $48,133,578
Total Lots 91
Lots Sold 60
% Sold 66%
Average Lot Value $802,226
Combined
Sale Total with Premium 205,426,150
Total in $ $408,866,917
Total Lots 224
Lots Sold 179
% Sold 79.90%
Average Lot Value $2,284,172
Top Ten Contemporary Art Works
Artist/Title Price w/
Premium
Bacon, Francis, Three Studies for Self-Portrait, Christie's $34,457,475
Bacon, Francis, Study for Head of George Dyer, Sotheby's $27,442,685
Koons, Jeff, Balloon Flower, circa 1880, Christie's $25,752,051
Freud, Lucian, Naked Portrait with Reflection, Christie's $23,519,891
Basquiat, Jean-Michel, Untitled, Sotheby's $10,133,029
Prince, Richard, Overseas Nurse, Sotheby's $8,457,901
Klein, Yves, ANT 131, Sotheby's $8,346,226
Warhol, Andy, Nine Multi-Colored Marilyns, Christie's $8,117,987
Warhol, Andy, Large Campbell�s Soup Can, Sotheby's $7,006,123
De Kooning, Willem, Untitled, Phillips de Pury $6,907,050
Sotheby's Top Ten
Artist/Title Price w/
Premium
Francis Bacon, Study for Head of George Dyer $29,615,419
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled $18,595,179
Richard Prince, Overseas Nurse $15,509,512
Yves Klein, ANT 131 $15,068,702
Andy Warhol, Large Campbell's Soup Can $10,881,011
Yves Klein, RE 3 $8,015,749
Marlene Dumas, The Visitor $6,913,725
Gerhard Richter, Ypsilon $5,591,296
Gerhard Richter, Untitled $5,370,891
Bridget Riley, Chant 2 $5,370,891
Top Ten Lots by % of High Estimate
Artist/Title % of
High Est.
Jean Tinguely, Méta-matic No. 7 599.6%
Yves Klein, ANT 131 523.2%
Farhad Moshiri, Kennedy's Salt and Pepper Shaker 481.8%
Yves Klein, ANT 2 325.9%
Antony Gormley, Angel of the North 325.9%
Piero Manzoni, Achrome 324.2%
Frank Auerbach, Head of Helen Gillespie 324.2%
Marlene Dumas, The Visitor 317.7%
Alighiero Boetti, Tutto 264.8%
Subodh Gupta, Untitled 240.5%
Domenico Gnoli, Pocket, 1968 219.8%
The three auction houses had a mix of very positive news—and disappointments. This counterpoint cautions against a reckless view of the market and suggests the market is functioning by balancing excitement for particular works against a healthy amount of skepticism.
The wide range of results also suggests that the Contemporary art market is reaching a point of stability after several years of rapid growth. The growth pace had been so high it began to cast a question over the market as a whole: could the market increase at such a rate without becoming a bubble or susceptible to a crash? Add credit problems in the United States and the threat of a worldwide recession. Taken together, they make a good recipe for worry.
That concern has been amply voiced in the press but the results from London seem to have confirmed in even the biggest doubters that the market has a firm foundation. That foundation comes from the presence of several blue-chip artists whose work can be counted on for market leadership and a base of collectors with the means to acquire these works. The top lots in the three evening sales were works by Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, Lucien Freud, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning. All six artists have strong auction histories and the success of their work—especially fine examples of their work—can be considered evidence of a flight to quality.
Overall, 179 works changed hands in the Evening Contemporary Art sales for $409 million (including the Buyer's Premium.) The average price for a work in the Evening sales was $2.28 million. But the most telling statistic was the sell-through rate. Overall 80% of the works on offer found buyers. For Sotheby's, that figure was a remarkable 95% and one of the reasons Sotheby's had the highest total of all three houses at $189 million.
Significant Sales
Works of art by Francis Bacon have led the Contemporary art market for more than a year. In 2007, $267 million in Bacon canvases were sold during Evening auctions. Half way through 2008 that number has already reached $200 million.
Sotheby's has played an important role in the Bacon market selling 9 of the top 15 Bacon lots, including 4 of the top 5 prices.
Sotheby's Study for Head of George Dyer sold for well above the expected $16 million for nearly $27.4 million. Christie's triptych self-portrait also outperformed its $20 million target by achieving a $34 million price. Those sales amply demonstrate the continuing depth and strength of the Bacon market, especially when there were other Bacon works on offer that did not perform as well.
Richard Prince's Overseas Nurse established a new record price for the artist. The nurse paintings began their auction cycle three years ago in London when Sotheby's sold Bachelor Nurse for $484,000. Since that time, an additional 16 nurse paintings have been offered at auction with prices steadily climbing to this season's $8.4 million record.
Yves Klein's price structure was substantially re-set in New York's May sales when two canvasses from the collection of Walter and Doris Lauff were sold for $23.5 million and more than $17 million. Those may have been exceptional works but the London sales confirmed the values achieved when three works by Klein were sold for prices well above their estimates. ANT 131 made almost $8.5 million; ANT 2 went for $4.5 million; and RE 3 sold for $6.3 million.
Other important sales at Sotheby's include the record price Bridget Riley's Chant 2 attracted. At $5.1 million, Riley's work moves into the top rank of artists and confirms her unique position as the leading example of a distinct vein of abstract art.
Marlene Dumas's The Visitor surprised the market by attracting $6.3 million, close to three times the high estimate, making her the living female artist with the highest auction price. But this was not the first time Dumas's work surprised the market or won her that title. In February of 2005, Acquavella Galleries bought The Teacher (sub a) for $3.34 million, a record then for a living woman artist. The sale of The Visitor far above the high estimate revives momentum in the Dumas market.
British artists also made important sales during the Sotheby's auction. Anthony Gormley's Angel of the North received a lot of press attention for achieving a $4.5 million price that was three times the high estimate. Frank Auerbach's Head of Helen Gillespie, which made $3.8 million and was also triple the high estimate, represents a record for the artist. Auerbach is an artist who has steadily gained value in recent years despite not having attracted much press attention.
The depth of Sotheby's sale was illustrated by the strong interest in other groups of artists. Italians Alighiero e Boetti and Piero Manzoni both had works that performed beyond expectations. Despite a number of records for Manzoni's Achrome works in recent sales, one sold in London for $3.88 million that had been estimated at less than half of that figure. Boetti's Tutto also doubled the high estimate to sell for $793,000.
Like the Italians, there were several Indian artists represented in the sale. Anish Kapoor's untitled sculpture sold for $3.88 million. Subodh Gupta had five works offered across three auction houses during the London Evening sales. All but one of those five sold for above the high estimate (the fifth sold within the estimated range.) Sotheby's untitled painting was the highest value lot of the five. It sold for $1.2 million which was double the high estimate.
Significant Buyers
The regional breakdown of buyers for the London Contemporary art sales confirms the importance of London as a growing center of the global art trade. Sotheby's will exclude their clients who wish to remain anonymous from the regional data but those clients account for fewer than 10% of the buyers in the Evening sale. Although the majority of lots were purchased by Europeans, North Americans acquired 32% of the lots. A substantial minority of the lots went to buyers from the rest of the world.
Market Trends
The growth of London in the global art market is a significant trend worth exploring in detail. Sotheby's Contemporary art Evening sale was remarkable for its 95% sell-through rate. But a closer examination of the three major Contemporary art sales held in London —in February, June and October—over the last three years shows that Sotheby's June sale has consistently sold 90% or more of the lots on offer. That level of consistency is rare in the art market, especially when Sotheby's other London Evening sales have only reached the 90% sell-through level in February of 2006, a period of market acceleration.
The total of London's Contemporary art Evening sales more than doubled from 2006 to 2007. In 2006, the combined Evening sales were $125 million and in 2007 the total was $302 million. Such a rapid increase would be hard to maintain—and probably not conducive to a stable market. When we look at relative sales by comparing the increases in the February sales, Year-to-Date (YTD) Sales for June and the Full Year totals, a consistent pattern emerges. The February sales have gone from $51 million to $189 million over three years while the YTD totals have gone from $106 million to $234 million to $378 million.
In 2006, the both the February Evening sale and the June Evening sale of Contemporary art were roughly equal at a little more than $50 million for each sale. In 2008, the two sales totals again reached parity at $189 million and $188 million respectively. But in 2007, a large disparity had emerged between the two sales. From 2006 to 2007, the February sale increased 75% in value but the June sale increased 160% in the same period. These data allow us to see the crucial moment of acceleration in the London market: the Spring of 2007.
What do all of these numbers mean? The London market has been growing but it has also been consolidating its position as an important sales center for the global art market. The June sales increased 31% from 2007 to 2008. That's impressive growth, though much more manageable than the growth rate of the year before.
More important, in terms of the state of the art market, sales growth in London has not come at the expense of growth in New York. Buyers will clearly participate wherever the work that interests them appears. Success in London has built upon sales success in New York. That's very meaningful because it confirms that the overall art market is still growing in dollar terms across all sale locations.
These numbers show that the art market continues to add to its base of collectors, an important factor for future stability; and that growth has not been a product of a bubble or a short-term shift in the market as many have suggested.
The Art Market Monitor is published by Marion Maneker.
For more information, go to ArtMarketMonitor.com
Helpful Links
Auction Results
View the Catalogues
Illustrated Sold Lot Archive Departments:
Contemporary Art
Contemporary Art
Sotheby's
Sale Total with Premium 94,701,550
Total in $ $188,853,831
Total Lots 75
Lots Sold 71
% Sold 94.70%
Average Lot Value $2,659,913
Median Lot Value $1,489,368
Christie's
Sale Total with Premium 86,241,600
Total in $ $171,879,508
Total Lots 58
Lots Sold 48
% Sold 83%
Average Lot Value $3,580,823
Median Lot Value $1,805,250
Phillips de Pury
Sale Total with Premium 24,483,000
Total in $ $48,133,578
Total Lots 91
Lots Sold 60
% Sold 66%
Average Lot Value $802,226
Combined
Sale Total with Premium 205,426,150
Total in $ $408,866,917
Total Lots 224
Lots Sold 179
% Sold 79.90%
Average Lot Value $2,284,172
Top Ten Contemporary Art Works
Artist/Title Price w/
Premium
Bacon, Francis, Three Studies for Self-Portrait, Christie's $34,457,475
Bacon, Francis, Study for Head of George Dyer, Sotheby's $27,442,685
Koons, Jeff, Balloon Flower, circa 1880, Christie's $25,752,051
Freud, Lucian, Naked Portrait with Reflection, Christie's $23,519,891
Basquiat, Jean-Michel, Untitled, Sotheby's $10,133,029
Prince, Richard, Overseas Nurse, Sotheby's $8,457,901
Klein, Yves, ANT 131, Sotheby's $8,346,226
Warhol, Andy, Nine Multi-Colored Marilyns, Christie's $8,117,987
Warhol, Andy, Large Campbell�s Soup Can, Sotheby's $7,006,123
De Kooning, Willem, Untitled, Phillips de Pury $6,907,050
Sotheby's Top Ten
Artist/Title Price w/
Premium
Francis Bacon, Study for Head of George Dyer $29,615,419
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled $18,595,179
Richard Prince, Overseas Nurse $15,509,512
Yves Klein, ANT 131 $15,068,702
Andy Warhol, Large Campbell's Soup Can $10,881,011
Yves Klein, RE 3 $8,015,749
Marlene Dumas, The Visitor $6,913,725
Gerhard Richter, Ypsilon $5,591,296
Gerhard Richter, Untitled $5,370,891
Bridget Riley, Chant 2 $5,370,891
Top Ten Lots by % of High Estimate
Artist/Title % of
High Est.
Jean Tinguely, Méta-matic No. 7 599.6%
Yves Klein, ANT 131 523.2%
Farhad Moshiri, Kennedy's Salt and Pepper Shaker 481.8%
Yves Klein, ANT 2 325.9%
Antony Gormley, Angel of the North 325.9%
Piero Manzoni, Achrome 324.2%
Frank Auerbach, Head of Helen Gillespie 324.2%
Marlene Dumas, The Visitor 317.7%
Alighiero Boetti, Tutto 264.8%
Subodh Gupta, Untitled 240.5%
Domenico Gnoli, Pocket, 1968 219.8%
Monday, 21 July 2008
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