Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst, 2007. Photo: Luke Stephenson, CC BY-SA 3.0. Modified to black and white.

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965. While still a student at Goldsmiths College in London, he founded and curated "Freeze," a group exhibition in which he painted two series of colored dots on the walls of the warehouse. This launched Hirst's successful career as an artist and that of an entire generation of British artists. Hirst describes the dot paintings as a means of "capturing the joy of color" and explains that it solved all the problems he had previously had with color. To this day, they remain among the artist's most prolific and distinctive series. Since 1987, Damien Hirst has had over 80 solo exhibitions worldwide and his work has been included in over 260 group exhibitions. In 2012, London's Tate Modern dedicated an extensive retrospective to him.

The monumental sculptures Myth and Legend were created in 2010 and 2011. For Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg, Damien Hirst subsequently translated the two works into highly complex porcelain figures, preserving down to the finest anatomical detail his idea of bringing two creatures from the realm of myth into an almost scientific reality.

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