Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is a global phenomenon. With groundbreaking approaches and some of the most innovative techniques in contemporary art, the visionary conceptual artist and painter has made a name for himself around the world. Today, his work represents a milestone in contemporary art.

The Emotions

With The Emotions, Damien Hirst takes his exploration of blossom, colour and transience in a new direction. The starting point is his Jacaranda paintings, inspired by a pivotal moment during the 2024 Cherry Blossoms exhibition at Museo Jumex in Mexico City: through the glass walls, the painted pink blossoms encountered real Jacaranda trees blooming in blue. Hirst was particularly fascinated by their elusive colouration – blue and violet seem almost to dissolve in the sunlight, mingling with pink and red and, in places, appearing to merge with the sky. His fascination became the beginning of this new series.

Stylistically, The Emotions continues the path of the Cherry Blossoms: away from flawless, machine-like precision and towards a more immediate, vivid form of painting. Fine pointillist dots of colour meet expressive splashes and contrasting textures; newly introduced leaf-shaped stamps give the compositions an organic, rhythmic structure. From a distance, the traces coalesce into luxuriantly flowering trees; up close, they dissolve into individual events of colour. The works share the same format of 120 × 96 cm and can be placed side by side to form an expansive panorama.

Conceptually, too, Hirst shifts the emphasis. While the Cherry Blossoms, and particularly The Virtues, invoke moral and philosophical virtues, The Emotions turns more directly towards the human psyche. With Love, Joy, Serenity, Trust and Inspiration, Hirst gives each work a specific feeling as its point of departure. The vibrating blues, violets, pinks and reds become a resonant field for emotion: love, joy, serenity, trust and inspiration appear less as fixed messages than as moods unfolding between colour, rhythm and perception.

In this way, Hirst extends the fleeting beauty of blossom into an inner dimension. The Jacaranda becomes a symbol of a transient moment in which nature and emotion, colour and memory briefly come together.

Where the Land Meets the Sea

Damien Hirst’s art is known for making waves. In his series Where the Land Meets the Sea, those waves become almost physically tangible: as spray, movement and the untamed energy of the British coastline. The abstract Action Paintings translate the force of the Atlantic into colour while preserving a sense of coastal life that has stayed with Hirst since the seaside walks of his childhood. The process of creation is as essential as the finished image. The starting point was a group of canvases that lay on the floor of Hirst’s studio while he was working on his internationally acclaimed Cherry Blossoms series. Paint splashes that landed on these canvases during the painting process became the foundation of a new body of work.

The grey ground recalls the sky above a turbulent sea. Brilliant colours stand out against it just as powerfully as intense black-and-white contrasts. Inspired by Robert Motherwell’s expressionist Beside the Sea paintings, Hirst moves between gestural painting, photographic memory and abstraction. The result is a series of highly dynamic compositions in which personal biography, painterly energy and the elemental force of the Atlantic converge.

The Beautiful Paintings

Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Paintings bring his famous Spin Paintings into the digital present. From the outset, their creation was shaped by the interplay of control and chance: paint hits a rotating canvas and spreads into rays, streaks and explosive movements – making each work unique.

For the Beautiful Paintings, Hirst transfers this principle into specially developed digital processes. From a palette of more than 250 colours and over 20 different style variations, ever-new combinations of colour, form and movement emerge. Chance remains a decisive element of the composition.

Like the classic Spin Paintings, these works are also conceived on circular supports. Their characteristic form creates a direct connection to the original series while continuing Hirst’s long-standing exploration of uniqueness, variation and authorship.

The role of the collectors is particularly significant: they were able to help shape individual combinations and thereby became part of the creative process themselves. Hirst once again shifts the boundaries between artist, artwork and audience. From the interplay of decision, chance and digital technology emerge intensely coloured works whose visual energy is immediately perceptible.

The Empresses

The butterfly is one of the recurring motifs in Damien Hirst’s work. It symbolises beauty, transformation and transience in equal measure. In the five-part series The Empresses, Hirst combines this motif with historical female figures, opening a view onto rulers from different cultures and eras.

The screenprints, embellished with fine glitter, bear the names of Nur Jahan, Theodora, Wu Zetian, Suiko and Taytu Betul. Their biographies lead into Persian-Indian, Byzantine, Chinese, Japanese and Ethiopian history.

Hirst dedicates not only an individual work to each ruler, but also a distinctive ornamental structure. Only on closer inspection does it become apparent that these patterns are composed of countless butterfly wings. Their form and composition refer to historical and biographical aspects of each empress.

The works thus combine visual opulence with historical memory. They invite the viewer to look beyond their decorative surface and engage with the lives and legacies of women whose influence was far-reaching, but whose stories are often less present in Western cultural memory.

The Virtues

Damien Hirst demonstrates with The Virtues that remaining true to oneself can also mean continually reinventing oneself. The works developed out of his large-scale Cherry Blossoms – a series through which Hirst also approached a subject his mother had long wished to see him paint: flowers.

Over several years, Hirst worked intensively and largely in seclusion on the Cherry Blossoms. Monumental canvases emerged in his London studio, where dense layers of colour, gestural brushstrokes, drips and splashes condensed into flowering landscapes.

Hirst painted, dripped and flung colour onto the canvas, repeatedly stepping back and then moving closer again. From this oscillation between control and exuberance emerged his highly individual interpretation of the Japanese cherry blossom.

Yet for Hirst, the blossom does not signify beauty alone. It also evokes its transience – and with it, one of the central themes running throughout his entire oeuvre: the inseparable connection between life and death.

The Cherry Blossoms were shown, among other venues, at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and the National Art Center, Tokyo. The Virtues translate their lush colour and symbolic resonance into a concentrated body of work in which Hirst’s fascination with beauty, time and transience becomes visible once again.

About the Artist

In the beginning was the dot.

Circular, clearly defined, coloured – at first simple, almost incidental. In the late 1980s, Damien Hirst began creating the dot paintings that would later become one of his best-known bodies of work. Evenly arranged circles of colour formed grid-like structures whose apparent simplicity concealed a complex meditation on colour, order and meaning.

How can colour be used so directly that it becomes both pure appearance and a carrier of meaning? This question has run through Hirst’s work since his early Spot Paintings. Some of these works refer directly to the aesthetics of the pharmaceutical industry. Soft or luminous colours, arranged in serial patterns, recall pills and medical preparations. Hirst intensified this association by naming numerous works after pharmaceutical substances. Scientific language, industrial production and the seductive effect of colour thus enter into an unusual dialogue.

The transfer of meaning from one medium to another is one of the fundamental principles of his art. This became particularly striking in 1991 with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde appears to swim towards the viewer, jaws open, inside a vast glass vitrine. The real animal becomes sculpture, the biological specimen becomes an image of death – and death, in turn, becomes something that escapes our imagination.

Few artists of his generation have repeatedly managed to polarise audiences to such a degree while simultaneously setting the international art market in motion.

In 2007, Hirst once again attracted worldwide attention with For the Love of God: a human skull cast in platinum and set with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink diamond on the forehead. The work became emblematic of an art in which beauty, luxury, provocation and death are inseparably intertwined.

This ambivalence lies at the heart of Hirst’s work. His art repeatedly revolves around the finitude of life – without ever being exclusively morbid. Hirst himself has described his fascination with death rather as a form of celebrating life.

Whether preserved animals, kaleidoscopic butterfly images, colour-exploding Spin Paintings or luxuriant cherry blossoms: in Damien Hirst’s work, life and death, beauty and transience, attraction and unease always exist side by side. It is precisely from this tension that his work continues to derive its enduring power.

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