His mother has said that she could not control her son when he was young. He was arrested twice for shoplifting and took to wearing bondage trousers and listening to the Sex Pistols. He worked for two years on London building sites, then in 1986 began his studies in fine art at Goldsmiths College. As a student he had a placement at a mortuary, an experience that influenced his later themes and materials.
He began to have his work exhibited in galleries and exhibitions and on a visit to one show in 1991, Charles Saatchi offered to fund whatever artwork Hirst wanted to make. The result was showcased the following year in the first Young British Artists show at the Saatchi Gallery. His work was titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and was a 4.3 metre tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a clear display case. It sold for £50,000. The shark was bought from a fisherman in Australia for £6,000.
His first major international presentation was in the Venice Biennale in 1993 with another preserved animal work, Mother and Child Divided, which was a cow and a calf, cut into sections and exhibited in a series of separate display cases.
In 1997 with Alex James of Blur and actor Keith Allen, he formed the band Fat Les, achieving a number two hit with a raucous football-themed song Vindaloo. After designing a series of “spin” and “spot” paintings Hirst gained the world record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist in 2007. Lullaby Spring, a three metre wide steel cabinet with 6,136 pills sold for $19.2 million to the Emir of Qatar. In the same year at the White Cube Gallery his work For the Love of God was shown. It was a human skull recreated in platinum with real teeth and adorned with 8,601 diamonds worth around £15m. It was modelled on an 18th-century skull, but the only surviving human part of the original is the teeth. It was sold for £50m.
Hirst’s most recent works completed in 2021 are a series of Cherry Blossoms. After exhibiting in Paris it was then moved to the National Art Center in Tokyo in 2022 marking his first major solo exhibition in Japan.
Buy his artwork at mainstream galleries here.
