Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is an English artist who grew up in Leeds and studied fine art at Goldsmiths College in London. In 1988, while still a student, he organised Freeze, a group show in an empty Port Authority building in the Docklands that the collector Charles Saatchi came to see.

Many of his best-known works deal with death and medicine. In 1992 Saatchi showed The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde. Mother and Child (Divided), a cow and a calf each cut in half and set in separate tanks, went to the Venice Biennale in 1993, and he won the Turner Prize in 1995. Alongside the tanks he made spot paintings, spin paintings and wall cabinets of painted pills such as Lullaby Spring. Tate holds Pharmacy, a room-size installation, and a copy of Mother and Child (Divided) that he gave in 2007.

In 2008 he sold a whole new show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, through Sotheby's in London instead of his galleries. In 2012 Tate Modern held the first major survey of his work in a British institution, and in 2017 he filled Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice with Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable.

His first NFT project, The Currency, was published by HENI in 2021. It ties 10,000 NFTs to 10,000 hand-painted spot works on paper. Each buyer had to choose between the token and the paper work, and the paper work of anyone who kept the token would be destroyed. In October 2022 he began burning those works at his London gallery and streamed it live.