"I want to make art, create objects that will have meaning for ever. It's a big ambition, universal truth, but somebody's gotta do it."
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965 and grew up in Leeds, where his early exposure to punk music and countercultural movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s fostered a rejection of traditional authority and artistic convention. This formative environment would later inform the confrontational tone and conceptual ambition that define his work. Hirst enrolled at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from 1986 to 1989, an institution that would prove pivotal in shaping a new generation of British artists committed to ideas over craftsmanship and experimentation over established norms.
While still a student, Hirst organized Freeze (1988), a landmark exhibition staged in a disused warehouse in London's Docklands. Featuring the work of fellow students including Sarah Lucas, Fiona Rae, and others, the exhibition is widely regarded as a catalyst for what would later be termed the Young British Artists (YBAs). Freeze attracted the attention of influential figures in the British art world, among them curator Nicholas Serota and collector Charles Saatchi, whose subsequent patronage would play a decisive role in Hirst's early career.
Hirst's international breakthrough came in the early 1990s with a series of sculptures employing preserved animals suspended in formaldehyde, most notably The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) and Mother and Child (Divided) (1993). These works confronted viewers with mortality in a literal and visceral manner, collapsing distinctions between art, science, and spectacle. Their presentation at major exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and later at Tate Britain, established Hirst as one of the most controversial artists of his generation. In 1995, he was awarded the Turner Prize, Britain's most prestigious contemporary art award.
Throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, Hirst expanded his practice beyond sculpture to include painting, installation, and printmaking. Series such as the Spot Paintings and Spin Paintings explored systems, chance, repetition, and colour, offering a counterpoint to the darkness of his earlier works while maintaining their conceptual rigor. His practice has consistently engaged with philosophical questions surrounding belief, value, beauty, and the inevitability of death, often invoking the tradition of the memento mori within a contemporary visual language.
In more recent years, Hirst has revisited painting with renewed intensity, producing large-scale figurative works, landscapes, and floral compositions alongside works on paper. These bodies of work reflect a growing interest in art history, particularly Romanticism and Impressionism, while continuing to grapple with existential themes. Major museums and institutions have presented retrospectives and focused exhibitions examining both his early conceptual works and his later painterly output, underscoring the breadth and evolution of his career.
Today, Damien Hirst remains a defining figure in contemporary art, whose influence extends beyond individual works to questions of authorship, commerce, and the role of the artist in a globalized art market. Continually evolving while remaining conceptually consistent, his oeuvre stands as a sustained investigation into the fragility of life and the enduring human desire to find meaning in the face of death.