Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst, born 1965 in Bristol, lives and works in London. In work known for both its formal beauty and its shock value, Hirst has made some of the most-discussed art of the 90s. Hirsts work suggests the transience of life. His sealed-up vitrines-as-mausoleums make you think about time and vast cycles of mortality, not only within the sculpture but all around us. Since 1988 Hirst has been making dot paintings that involve color systems. These paintings form a fascinating parallel to his sculpture, and provide an encoded window onto his thinking. In the paintings, Hirst plays with rules and randomness by setting up an open, but highly structured system. All the paintings have a regular grid of solid, arbitrarily-colored dots. Though these paintings do not resemble his sculpture, they are not dissimilar in content: Hirst attempts to imbue abstract elements of painting with his sense of the awfulness, or at least the arbitrariness, of life. Here, a familiar form like systemic painting is run through with unpredictability as chaos and order blur.