Most Popular Books by Damien Hirst

"An extremely candid autobiography of Hirst presented in a series of conversations with the British writer, Gordon Burn ... intimate conversations are puncutated with art form all phases of his career chosen by Hirst himself.

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 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.

This catalogue is published to accompany the exhibition - New Religion, a major new project by Damien Hirst, and the artist''s first to be shown in an active church. It highlights the conflicts between science and religion, art and beliefs.

Published to accompany the exhibition held at the Serpentine Galley, London, entitled, ''In the darkest hour there may be light: works from Damien Hirst''s murderme colection'', 25 November 2006 - 28 January 2007.

Due to popular demand, this extraordinary book project by Damien Hirst is now available in a reduced format. This dynamic and provocative collection of Hirst''s ideas and obsessions is a powerful combination of text and visual elements. Each piece is set against a visual narrative of drawings, words, photography, typography, pop-ups, and other special effects that make this book like no other. An essay by cult novelist Gordon Burn looks at Hirst''s work and the breadth of its impact. Designed by Jonathan Barnbrook, this is a landmark publication that has redefined the fine art monograph. AUTHOR BIO: Damien Hirst was born in Bristol and studied fine art at Goldsmiths College in London. In 1995, he won the prestigious Turner Prize. He has had recent solo exhibitions at the White Cube, London; the Marble Palace, Russia; Saatchi Gallery, London; Gagosian Gallery, New York; and Tate Gallery, London. Gordon Burn is an award-winning writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His book of interviews with Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, was published in 2002.

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).

Some of Hirsts iconic works - pickled shark, cow, fish. Butterfly painting, medical pictures. Disease, surgical operations. Diamond skull.

This book is a creative guide to the making of arguably the most extraordinary art object to be made in the 21st century. Published to accompany the 2007 exhibition Damien Hirst: Beyond Belief at White Cube, London, it gives a fascinating pictorial insight into how Hirst''s diamond skull piece "For the Love of God" was conceived and produced. Illustrated with candid behind-the-scenes photographs by Johnnie Shand Kydd, the book includes a number of preparatory drawings by Damien Hirst and a fold out image of the diamond skull. Accompanying this is an essay by the art historian Rudi Fuchs, who writes: "The skull is out of this world, celestial almost. I tend to see it as a glorious intense victory over death." A number of leading experts in the fields of archaeology and dentistry have also contributed detailed studies on the diamond skull, including analyses of its age and ancestry.

"From the Cradle to the Grave" presents a key selection of drawings and sketches produced by the famed English artist and provocateur Damien Hirst over the past 15 years. For Hirst, drawing is a way of maintaining the flow of imagination, and he does it constantly. Ranging from raw, impulsive sketches to detailed and well-thought-out drawings, these works allow us to explore the artist''s preoccupations and passions and his fascination with the ambiguity at the heart of human experience: the confusing relations between art and life, life and death, image and reality, communion and isolation. The drawings are complemented by a selection of thumbnail photographs of finished sculptures and paintings. Accompanying essays by well-known writers Annuska Shani and A. A. Gill help the reader make connections between the drawings and Hirst''s other works of art. Exquisitely produced using a six-color printing process, "From the Cradle to the Grave" illuminates how Hirst''s compelling drawings were conceived and shows us the vitality behind their creation.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Tate Britain, Mar. 3-May 31, 2004.

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.

This comprehensive monograph was produced to accompany the drawings retrospective ‘Damien Hirst: Corpus: Drawings 1981-2006’ held at Gagosian Gallery, Madison Avenue, New York in 2006. It features more than two hundred drawings which offer a historical insight into rarely seen aspects of the artist’s work and process. Included are early drawings from Hirst’s student days; pencil sketches for seminal sculptures such as ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ 1991, ‘A Thousand Years’ 1991, ‘The Acquired Inability to Escape’ 1992, ‘Away from the Flock’ 1994 and ‘The Hat Makes the Man’ 2003; preparatory diagrams for early spot paintings and medicine cabinets; a large-scale series of fourteen drawings for The Stations of the Cross (2004); and proposals for unrealised and future projects. Accompanying the drawings is a conversation between the artist and political philosopher John Gray (author of Straw Dogs, False Dawn and Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern), and an essay by British historian Simon Baker. Hardback/with 29 gatefolds and book ribbon

This book comes in three different color patterns (all with the same cover design). The most comprehensive book devoted to the incomparable and iconic work of Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama, now in her eighties, has become a vital force in contemporary art and an influence on generations of artists. Arriving in New York City in 1958 from her native Japan, she embarked on a series of works that forged a new visual vocabulary--the Net paintings, which were composed of scores of small, thickly painted loops spanning large canvases. Her singular approach to art making continued in other extraordinary bodies of work, including the phallic soft sculptures which she later incorporated into full-scale environments. In 1973 she returned to Japan, where she lives and works today. Since then, she has created dazzling walk-in mirror rooms and her now-famous pumpkin sculptures, as well as writing poetry and novels. In this book--created in close collaboration with Kusama and her Tokyo studio--the breadth and import of this watershed artist''s career are considered in depth. In addition to studies of the development of her artistic vocabularies across different media, the book includes ephemera, sketches, and photographs from the artist''s extensive archive that have never been seen before. The publication is timed to coincide with the artist''s major touring retrospective, which makes its American debut at the Whitney Museum in New York in summer 2012, as well as with the much-anticipated collaboration with powerhouse fashion brand Louis Vuitton. Contributors include: Leslie Camhi, RoseLeeGoldberg, Laura Hoptman, Chris Kraus, Arthur Lubow, Kevin McGarry, Louise Neri, Akira Tatehata, and Olivier Zahm.

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.

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.

Damien Hirst is a famous and ambiguous art personality who won in 1995 the Turner Prize, the most prestigious contemporary art prize in the United Kingdom and is considered the best paid living artist. In 2006, sculptor Hirst had his first "Latin-American" exhibition at the art gallery Hilario Galguera (Mexico City): "The Death of God. Towards a Better Understanding of a Life Without God Aboard a Ship of Fools" adding "Mexican" possibilities to his recurring thematic preoccupations present in his photorealistic paintings, sculptures and installations. The present book analyses the presence of Damien Hirst in México and the consequences of the "Mexican" exhibitions in his career.

Requiem is a major retrospective in two volumes covering over one hundred works dating from 1990 to 2008.

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.

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

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.