The Turner prize winner and epicenter of the YBA movement. Hirst's emblematic art of our era revolutionizes the art market. Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today, creating truly iconic artworks.

A genuine star of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, Damien Hirst has always made a point of mixing up different media. Whether as a sculptor, an installation artist, a painter, or a printmaker, Hirst has produced many of the most spectacular and widely discussed works in recent years and helped to revolutionize the art market. Damien Hirst’s, For the Love of God, the diamond-encrusted replica of the skull of a thirty-five-year-old man from the thirteenth century, broke all records to become the most expensive contemporary artwork in the world. Damien Hirst´s artworks are truly emblematic icons of our era, with their recurring motives such as dots, butterflies, cows, sharks, skulls, pills, and pharmacy cabinets. His works, captivating and intense as they are, challenge our stereotyped concepts and beliefs. Damien Hirst’s shark, suspended in formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), is widely recognized, as are his real butterflies suspended in paint or thousands of butterfly wings arranged in a mandala-like pattern – the famous Damien Hirst butterfly paintings. Since 1986 he has been producing the Spot paintings (sometimes called Dot Paintings), a series of paintings with evocative pharmacological titles, which display lines of colored spots. Damien Hirst´s Spot paintings and his Spin paintings became iconic series. Inspired by such diverse themes as life, death, art, science, and medicine, Damien Hirst’s art takes a direct and challenging approach to ideas about existence. The energy and inventiveness are also to be found in Damien Hirst's prints, which continue to stir controversy within the viewer with the same intensity.

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst, a poster boy for the Young British Artists who rose to prominence in late 1980s London, is one of the most notorious artists of his generation.

Cathedral Print, Duomo is a silkscreen with glaze and pearlised colours. Modelled after Hirst’s Superstition paintings of 2006, these radiating compositions of meticulously arranged butterfly wings create intricate patterns of dazzling shapes and colours that evoke the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals or the tesserae of Byzantine mosaics. By allying the fragility of the butterfly wings with the monumentality of religious art, these prints engage the big existential themes – nature, life, religion – that have defined Hirst’s career.​​Hirst began using butterflies in his work as early as 1989. Describing the insect as a ‘universal trigger’, he has explained: “Everyone’s frightened of glass, everyone’s frightened of sharks, everyone loves butterflies.” The ‘Cathedrals’ are part of the ‘Kaleidoscope’ series, conceived by the artist in 2001 after he found a Victorian tea tray decorated with intricate patterns of butterfly wings. The works reference the spiritual symbolism of the butterfly, used by the Greeks to depict Psyche, the soul, and in Christian imagery to signify the resurrection. The perfect symmetry alludes to both the displays of light, colour and beauty as presented in Gothic stained glass windows, and the circular patterns of Buddhist mandalas. The paintings, which are rendered on uniformly sized circular, square or diamond-shaped canvases, might variously be interpreted as explorations into the nature of beauty, religion, death and the fragility of life.​

Show all results