New Releases by Damien Hirst

A revealing collection of quotations from world-renowned artist Damien Hirst Hirst-isms is a collection of quotations—bold, surprising, often humorous, and always insightful—from celebrated artist Damien Hirst, whose controversial work explores the connections between art, religion, science, life, and death. Emerging in the 1990s as a leading member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Hirst first became famous and gained a reputation as a provocateur with a series of artworks featuring dead and sometimes dissected animals (including a shark, sheep, and cow) preserved in glass tanks filled with formaldehyde. Gathered from interviews and other primary sources and organized by subject, these quotations explore Hirst’s early years, family life, and the beginnings of his fascination with art; the major themes of his work; his influences and heroes; his motivation; his process and the boundary-pushing production of his work; and his thoughts on the art world, fame, and money. The result is a comprehensive and nuanced book that sheds new light on a fascinating and important contemporary artist. Select quotations from the book: “The less I feel like an artist, the better I feel.”“I like it when people love my art. I like it when people hate my art. I just don’t want them to ignore my art.”“Painting’s like the most fabulous illusion, because there’s nothing at stake. Except yourself.”“I’m interested in the confusion between art and life, I like it when the world gets in the way.”“Sometimes you have to step over the edge to know where it is.”

This book was published on the occasion of ''Damien Hirst: Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures'' at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London. Marking the first phase of Hirst?s yearlong takeover of the Britannia Street gallery, the exhibition featured rarely seen works by the artist created between 1993 and 2021.00Mimicking color photographs, the Fact Paintings are rendered in oil on canvas, sometimes with meticulous fidelity, at others reveling in the physicality of mark making. Their verisimilitude recalls the historical role of painting as a tool to represent the visible world and lead the viewer to believe that a two-dimensional image is, in fact, the three-dimensional object it portrays. In the Fact Sculptures, presented alongside the related paintings, Hirst moves beyond the readymade, instead constructing detailed replicas of real objects.00This publication features extensive reproductions of the forty-six exhibited works, as well as photographs of the installation. It also includes a new essay by Alice Godwin, which considers both the art historical context of the works as well as the new meaning they take on within contemporary life.00Exhibition: Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, UK (12.04.-24.05.2021).

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Damien Hirst: The Veil Paintings at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. Taking the Visual Candy paintings of the 1990s as a point of departure, in this series Hirst embraces color and gestural painting on a large scale. Referencing both Abstract Expressionism and Impressionism, including Georges Seurat and Pierre Bonnard, The Veil Paintings layer brushstrokes and bright dabs of heavy impasto, enveloping the viewer in vast fields of color.0The publication documents thirty-seven paintings in the exhibition with plate and detail images as well as installation photography. It features a new essay by Lisa Small with illustrations and a double-sided dust jacket, available in two options.00Exhibition: Gagosian, Beverly Hills, USA (01.03-140-.04.2018).

In 2005 Damien Hirst began photographing every dispensing pharmacy in the Greater London area. Shooting both the individual pharmacists behind their counters and the exterior views of the city''s 1,832 chemists, the project has taken over a decade to complete. The images are brought together in their entirety in this extraordinary ten-volume artist''s book, which presents a portrait of the city through the people and places that prescribe the medicines we take on a habitual and daily basis. Hirst''s career-long obsession with the minimalist aesthetics employed by pharmaceutical companies--the cool colors and simple geometric forms--fi rst manifested in his series of Medicine Cabinets, conceived in 1988 while still at Goldsmiths College. For his 1992 installation Pharmacy Hirst recreated an entire chemist within the gallery space, stating: "I''ve always seen medicine cabinets as bodies, but also like a cityscape or civilization, with some sort of hierarchy within it. [ Pharmacy ] is also like a contemporary museum. In a hundred years it will look like an old apothecary." Pharmacy London similarly embodies the artist''s realization of an "idea of a moment in time." The publica- tion also, however, reads as a distilled expression of Hirst''s continuing belief in the near-religious role medicine plays in our society.

This exquisite hardback volume, boasting a ribbed leather spine, presents the second collection of a series of drawings on paper by Damien Hirst (born 1965), rendered in a range of mediums including silverpoint, charcoal and ink. The drawings form part of Hirst''s most ambitious project to date, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, presented at the Pinault Collection''s two Venetian museums--the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana--from April to December 2017. The exhibition marked the first time in the Collection''s history that both museums had been dedicated to the work of a single artist.

"Breakfast at The Wolseley gave Damien and I the perfect opportunity to discuss the business of the day," remembers Frank Dunphy, Damien Hirst's business manager, "the bow-tied super-ego to Mr. Hirst's id," as The Wall Street Journal has described him. "Always on time, Damien would first hold out his hand for a pen or pencil and would then begin sketching on the back of his placemat." Portraits of Frankis published to coincide with Dunphy's retirement after almost 15 years with the artist. Seen here for the first time, Hirst's portraits were sketched during the pair's regular breakfast meetings at the famous Wolseley restaurant in London between 2004 and 2010. They provide a touching illustration of Frank and Damien's collaborative relationship as it unfolded over the course of some of the most extraordinary years of the artist's career.

The visual candy paintings'' were made between 1992 and 1994. The works showcase the ways in which Damien Hirst used the signifier of candy during the early 1990’s, exploring questions of pure aesthetics. Addressing the viewer on a deliberately emotional and instinctive level, these works, abetted by their exuberant titles, among them Some Fun (1993) and Dippy Dappy Dabby (1993), set out to question the implication that aesthetically pleasing art is inherently insignificant.0.

The central sculpture is a severed bull''s head with golden horns and crowned with a solid gold disc, suspended in formaldehyde and encased in a golden vitrine. Also included is Judgement Day, a 30 foot long gold cabinet filled with close to 30,000 manufactured diamonds. The artist''s series of photorealist paintings including The Golden Jubilee (2008), The Agra (2006) and The Premiere Rose (2006) here are illustrated alongside 20 short historical texts, alongside the diamonds.

This book is the first and most significant documentation of Damien Hirst''s iconographic spot paintings and this comprehensive publication spans his career. Every spot painting Hirst has produced is included in this substantial publication with over 95% of them illustrated. Conceived at the time of Hirst''s 2012 exhibition of the same title held in 11 Gagosian Galleries including New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva and Hong Kong, this publication has been long in the making.

Published on the occasion of Damien Hirst''s exhibition at White Cube in Hong Kong in the spring of 2013. Amongst new works illustrated in the publication are some of Hirst''s latest series: the ''Entomology'' paintings and the ''Blade'' paintings.

Jonathan Yeo is one of Britain''s best-known portrait painters. Over more than a decade, he has gained an international reputation for painting some of the most famous faces of our age. Models and movie stars, artists and actors, politicians and princes all have been the subject of his iconic, and often ironic, portraits. Coinciding with a retrospective exhibition at London''s National Portrait Gallery, ''The Many Faces of Jonathan Yeo'' is the first major publication on the artist. Featuring his most popular paintings, drawings, collages and prints, the book also presents several new canvases made especially for the show.

With full-color plates of paintings and sculptures, this title was produced for the inaugural exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong, Damien Hirst: Forgotten Promises. It includes "For Heaven''s Sake" (2008), a life-size human baby skull cast in platinum and covered in 8,128 pink and white diamonds, as well as beautiful diamond cabinets in gold and silver. A group of paintings from 2008 to 2009, including "Age of Magnificence" and "Fading Magnificence," show real butterflies entombed in layers of shiny metallic paint. The new Love Paintings are painted in oil with painstaking attention to realistic detail. "Why else would you do it, when you could just get a photograph that looks identical?" Hirst has said. "But it''s not the same thing, is it? A photograph is from a moment, a split second. Painting is about stopping to look at the world, considering it, and giving it more and more importance."

In total The Souls is made up of 4 butterflies, in 80 different colourways each one in an edition of 15. Vibrant with hue, the finished effect of each image is that of a resonanty tension between the stillness of death and the trembling iridescent life that the individual butterflies convey. The Souls is therefore quintessentially Hirstian, combining the impact of visual spectacle with a powerfully eloquent confluence of medium and visual language. Each butterfly is depicted here and 4 foil blocks inserts depict the actual foiling used in the original prints. Hirst''s fascination with butterflies derives in large part from the way in which these beautiful insects embody both the beauty and impermanence of life, becoming symbols of faith and mortality.

Published on the occasion of Damien Hirst’s exhibition at L&M Arts, New York, in October 2010, this first--and complete--book on the artist''s medicine cabinets is contextualized by the artist’s following of the punk movement. The first twelve sculptures in the book are named after the title tracks on the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks album. The front-page newspaper spreads punctuating the book from the album’s release year (1977) and the year of the cabinets’ completion (1989) provide a context for reading James Frey’s story-poem, Fuck This and Fuck That, which describes the listless protest of a teenage waster. The song titles and cabinet names - No Feelings, Liar, and Seventeen - resound with the frustrations of Thatcherite Britain and the violence borne out in daily uprest and anarchy, as depicted in the news: IRA MEN HELD IN BIG SWOOP; RIOT SHIELDS OUT AGAIN and DOCKS JOBS-FOR-LIFE TO BE AXED BY AUTUMN. Hirst’s medicine cabinets have long been described as temples of medicinal hierarchies providing nothing more than a short-term cure in the face of death. Viewing the pervasive successes and exploitations of the pharmaceutical industry as a belief system in itself is evidence of our society''s dependency and a form of escapism. Hirst has commented: "I’ve always seen medicine cabinets as bodies, but also like a cityscape or civilization, with some sort of hierarchy within it. It’s also like a contemporary museum of the Middle Ages. In a hundred years’ time this will look like an old apothecary. A museum of something that’s around today." The publication features a transcription of a radio conversation between Damien Hirst and Steve Jones, guitarist for the Sex Pistols, covering music, girls, money, drugs, drinks, and smokes. The book’s index lists every medicine cabinet ever made and the exhibition itself includes original Sex Pistols memorabilia including album sleeves and t-shirts. This is the signed and lmiited edition of this book.

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present Damien Hirst: Poisons + Remedies, a catalogue illustrating the two new painting series which debuted at Gagosian Gallery, Davies Street in London 2010. The Poisons paintings feature skulls, a recurrent icon in Hirst''s oeuvre, silkscreened in black UV ink with charcoal onto large canvases and titled after toxic chemical preparations, suggesting possible causes of death accompanying each ghostly visage. The Remedies paintings contain colored resin and plaster pills scattered across a white background in a chaotic arrangement. Poisons + Remedies reminds us of the tenuous boundaries between life and death, acknowledging the life-altering role of science while alluding to the redemptive powers of art. This fully illustrated catalogue also features two essays by novelist Gary Shteyngart.

In this unique art book and epic collaboration, long-term friends, photographer Rankin and artist Damien Hirst, leverage their creative mediums and shared dark wit. Inspired by their conversations around myths, monsters and legends, they decided to extend their exploration of the subject by creating something tangible. Working to break boundaries of convention, the resulting photographs are ethereal and menacing, the ancient world viewed through a modern lense.

Born in Bristol in 1965, Damien Hirst grew up in Leeds and studied at Goldsmiths College, London. Most notable amongst the exhibitions he curated whilst at college was Freeze, in 1988, in which he exhibited his work and that of his contemporaries. The exhibition is widely believed to have been the starting point of the Young British Artists' careers, and a defining moment in kick-starting cutting edge British contemporary art. Hirst's body of work confronts the scientific, philosophical and religious aspects of human existence and includes sculpture, painting and printmaking. He has exhibited widely and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995 for 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living'. In 2004, Hirst collaborated with Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst to exhibit recent works at Tate Britain, under the title Ina-Gadda-da-Vida and exhibited his solo show, The Agony and The Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989-2004 at the Archaeological Museum, Naples. In 2006, works from the artist's murderme collection were exhibited at the Serpentine gallery, London: 'In the darkest hour there may be light.'

Published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Wallace Collection, London 14.10.2009 - 24.1.2010.

Published on the occasion of Damien Hirst’s exhibition at the Wallace Collection, London, in October 2009, this small volume presents 30 colorplates showcasing a selection of blue skull and flower paintings from that show, and three gatefolds. An interview also featured in the larger Wallace Collection catalogue is also included here. This is the signed limited edition of this title.

Published on the occasion of renowned British artist Damien Hirst’s double exhibition at White Cube''s two London galleries, Mason’s Yard and Hoxton Square, in November 2009, Nothing Matters presents Hirst’s new series of large-scale color triptychs opening into lush gatefolds. Plus, Hirst''s his oil paintings on newspaper are reproduced for the first time.. The book also includes an in-depth interview with Gordon Burn.

Published on the occasion of the artist''s show at Musée Océanographique de Monaco in April 2010, ''Cornucopia'' celebrates Hirst''s paintings and sculptures from 1994 - 2009

Catalog of an exhibition held May 1, 2010-Aug. 14, 2010 at Haunch of Venison in London.

This details all the Damien Hirst works in the Pinchuk Art Centre exhibition, Kyiv in April 2009. The book features over ninety works including iconic early pieces from the 1990’s, sculptures, and paintings from recent years, together with the new, previously unseen skull paintings. Born in Bristol in 1965, Damien Hirst studied Goldsmith’s College. In 1988 he curated the now renowned exhibition, Freeze, help in London. In 1991, he had his first solo exhibition in London entitled In and Out of Love and the following year he was a major part of the groundbreaking Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. He was awarded the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize in 1995. Hirst’s work has been shown in many important group and solo shows throughout the world and his is now one of Britain’s most celebrated living artists. He lives and works in Devon and London.