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.

Deckchair orange playfully utilizes one of Damien Hirst's familiar motifs: a monochromatic background interrupted by a scattering of butterflies, a theme that the artist first introduced into his work after seeing flies get stuck on primed canvases in his studio. The artist sees the butterflies ‘stuck’ to his monochrome canvases as metaphors for the unforeseen interruptions in life—happy accidents, in this case.

For the artist, the appeal of butterflies is created largely by the appearance of life they retain in death. They symbolize regeneration, fortune, and freedom in a world characterized by a materialistic consumerism that despite all glorification of money and what it can buy always longs for a deeper meaning behind the surfaces – and which yet can never truly get behind those surfaces; longing for spirituality and transcendence and yet always doomed to accept that there might be nothing behind the polished images.

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“ I have always liked that idea of something going wrong and something being created from it. „

—Damien Hirst