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.

It all started in Hoxton, East London in 1993 when curator Joshua Compston staged a mock parish fair called “A Fête Worse than Death”. All Young British Artists were invited to perform, Gary Hume was disguised as a Mexican bandit selling tequilas, Tracey Emin did palm reading and Damien Hirst dressed in a clown costume together with Angus Fairhurst who made spin paintings using a potter’s wheel. Later in 1995, Hirst decided to build a drawing machine with which he could start his own Spin painting works.

The complex and lengthy process was characterised by a high degree of physical intervention at every stage by the artist, sometimes to a physically dangerous degree, as the copper plates, fixed to the spin machine, rotated at alarming speeds. Working closely with the printers, Hirst set colour guidelines then made a final selection of etchings, offering a customised portfolio of work that had stretched the etching medium to its limits.

"Spin, Spin Sugar" is one of the fourteen etchings that comprise the second volume of two portfolios, In a Spin, the Action of the World on Things I and II, Hirst’s attempt to develop his concept of spin drawings and paintings into the print medium.
Deliciously fresh, playful, childish, colourful and fun, the Spin etchings were made by the artist in London in 2002.

Show all results

“ I really like making them. And I really like the machine, and I really like the movement. Every time they’re finished, I’m desperate to do another one. „

—Damien Hirst