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.

Prints and printmaking hold an important position in Hirst’s artistic output, and Utopia reflects this constant investigation into and re-invention of techniques and medias. The use of metallic foil blocking onto inkjet transforms the print, inevitably drawing the viewer in with the bright colors and shimmering surfaces. Utopia draws inspiration from his 2004 paintings, Pills showing a series of various hand-painted tablets meticulously showcased and ordered in a cold-lit window.

The sterile, stainless steel wall-mounted medicine cabinet appears almost as an altar. Praising modern pharmaceuticals and highlighting our obsession with drugs, the cabinet shows how medicine and science seem to have replaced society ‘s faith in God. While Damien Hirsts’ pills and caps are colorful, nicely arranged, alluring and seductive as sweets, there is invariably an uncanniness underlying the beauty of these little tablets. By juxtaposing symbols of toxicity with antidotes his work depicts, once again, the fundamental themes of human existence and ambiguity; our struggle between the forces of dark and light, the complex relation between life and death, desire and fear.

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“ The array of tablets create a contrast between panacea and the obsessive repetition of the object toward an image of hyperbolic dependency. „

—Damien Hirst