Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. In 1984 he moved to London, where he worked in construction before studying for a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College from 1986 to 1989. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995.
Since the late 1980’s, Hirst has used a varied practise of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing to explore the complex relationship between art, life and death. Explaining: “Art’s about life and it can’t really be about anything else … there isn’t anything else,”
Hirst’s work investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience.
Damien Hirst is to exhibit his latest paintings, ‘Cherry Blossoms’, at Fondation Cartier in Paris. The solo exhibition opens today.
The Cherry Blossoms were begun shortly after Hirst’s sculptural project ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ (2017). Referencing both Impressionism and Pointillism, as well as Action Painting, the series revisit the spontaneous joy of painting.
The imagined mechanical painter, omnipresent in the ‘Spot’ and ‘Spin Paintings’ series, is replaced in the ‘Cherry Blossoms’ series by the fallibility of the hand of the artist working in his studio.
"The Cherry Blossoms are about beauty and life and death. They’re extreme – there’s something almost tacky about them. Like Jackson Pollock twisted by love. They’re decorative but taken from nature. They’re about desire and how we process the things around us and what we turn them into, but also about the insane visual transience of beauty – a tree in full crazy blossom against a clear sky. It’s been so good to make them, to be completely lost in colour and in paint in my studio. They’re garish and messy and fragile and about me moving away from Minimalism and the idea of an imaginary mechanical painter and that’s so exciting to me." - Damien Hirst -
