Damien Hirst, in full Damien Steven Hirst, was born in 1965, in Bristol, England, UK.
He grew up in Leeds with his mother where he began his artistic journey by attending the city morgue, an experience that greatly influenced his way of perceiving life and death. He graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1989.
In 1984, the artist decided to move to London where he curated the collective exhibition "Freeze" at the Hospital Club. The exhibition, in which Hirst exhibited various pieces and works by artists known at College, captured the attention of the press to such an extent that it was interpreted as the beginning of a new movement for British artists which, later, in 1996, would take the name of YBAs. It is precisely from that moment that the eclectic artist will be able to conquer the public, the press, institutions and collectors. Considered an enfant terrible of the 1990s art world, Hirst presented dead animals in formaldehyde as art, as a reflection on mortality and the human unwillingness to confront it. Like the French artist Marcel Duchamp, Hirst employed ready-made objects to shocking effect, and in the process he questioned the very nature of art.
Thanks to the Anglo-Iraqi collector Charles Saatchi, Damien Hirst's career will take off internationally, giving rise to a fruitful collaboration between the two which will end in 2003. In 1991, Hirst held two highly successful personal exhibitions in London: "Internal affairs ” at the Institute of Contemporary Art and “In & Out of love” at Woodstock Street Gallery. In 1992, the versatile artist was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, the most significant annual contemporary art prize reserved for British artists under the age of 50 and three years later he won the coveted prize thanks to his work "Mother and child divided ”. In 1994, thanks to the sale of the work "The Physical Impossibility Of Death In the Mind Of Someone Living", Hirst became the most expensive living artist second only to his American colleague Jasper Johns.
Endowed with both entrepreneurial and artistic aspirations, Hirst opened a restaurant in Notting Hill in 1997, "Pharmacy", whose furnishings he will auction off seven years later. In the same year he will improvise director by directing a video for Blur. In the 2000s the artist will mainly create large-scale works such as “Hymn” (2000), “Sensation” (2003) and “Virgin mother” (2006), mixing the sacred and the profane, but also the famous human skull in platinum casting, diamond-encrusted "For the Love of God" (2007), probably the most expensive work ever made. Protagonist of many internationally famous exhibitions such as the retrospective organized at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, "The agony and the ecstasy", 2004, and at the Tate Modern in London, 2014, and still active in the music industry, Hirst is one of the most famous, complete and controversial artists of our times.
