Puccio Gallery

Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist and the most prominent member of the group known as “Young British Artists” (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and has been claimed to be the richest living artist to date.

Hirst was born in Bristol, England, and grew up in Leeds.  He led a wild lifestyle as a teenager until his conservative mother encouraged his art talent. He studied at Leeds College of Art and Design, and from 1986 to 1989, was a student at Goldsmith’s College, University of London where he received a fine art degree.  During that period, he worked in a mortuary, which influenced his subsequent art expression.  In 1988, while at Goldsmith’s, he converted an abandoned London Docklands warehouse into an exhibition and curated the Freeze exhibition that featured other young independent, conceptual artists.  He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine became the iconic work of British art in the 1990s, and the symbol of Britart worldwide.

Apart from his animal works, Hirst is famous for his “spin paintings,” created on a spinning circular surface, and “spot paintings”, which are rows of randomly-colored circles, and his butterfly works - stunning mosaics created from real butterfly wings which have been exhibited in major museums and have fetched multi-millions in auction.

In September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and by-passing his long-standing galleries. The auction exceeded all predictions, raising £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst’s own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves.