Insights

It slips off the tongue now. First published on Sat 7 Apr 2012 19.06 EDT. Damien Steven Hirst (/ h ɜːr s t /; born 7 June 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. At the front end of this long, narrow gallery, pills in the shape of lozenges, bomblets, soothing pink discuses, suckable bluehearts - transparent, matt or shiny - are ranged along a shelf, pretty and pop-art-colourful as melt-in-the-mouth sweeties, all smoothly rounded off at the corners and oh so touchable. The ash stinks, the vessel is defiled, life's going up in smoke. The cheapest is a baby blue Pfizer pill (yes, there is a lot of product placement here), in an edition of 30, which is advertised as being on sale at £960, but had already risen in price by the morning after the opening due to demand for the Hirst brand. How much genuine art is there in the mass production of Damien's pill art? As the show moves towards its close and Hirst’s stratospheric financial success becomes more and more apparent, the imagery becomes almost apocalyptic. Crematorium is its trenchant title. But attention is different from respect, and if you ask the man in the street he’ll tell you that Hirst became a billionaire by cynically exploiting our collective greed and stupidity. It plays into some of his favourite themes: death and mortality, for example. By Cordelia Lynn. At the end of the gallery, things are less tidy. On this scale, there is a touch of the world of Alice here, when the everyday turns nightmarish. In these cruel, nihilistic pieces, he imagines a God who gives life gratuitously, only to take it mindlessly away. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth valued at £215m in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List. Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. Or at least only someone who has never heard of Hirst's celebrity, his finances, his domination of the market, his long career in history and headlines, can see this work fresh without associating its force with that fame. The most insightful comments on all subjects will be published daily in dedicated articles. Damien Hirst, best known for being a Painter, was born in Bristol, England, UK on Monday, June 7, 1965. Unconventional artist and foremost member of the Young British Artists. It didn't have to be this way: think of Bridget Riley's spots or Gerhard Richter's squares. Our journalists will try to respond by joining the threads when they can to create a true meeting of independent Premium. The opening galleries return to the student Hirst of the 1980s, starting out with MDF kitchen units as a pepped-up pastiche of minimalist Donald Judd, and a hairdryer in Jeff Koons plexiglass keeping a ping-pong ball mindlessly alive with its gust. What about backwards? But even so Hirst has some sort of compulsion to repeat himself. Schizophrenogenesis reads the neon sign hanging on the wall at the back of the gallery, with each letter picked out in a different colour. Painted by Hirst himself, these spots had some optical impact at the off, pullulating on their boards like one of those colour blindness tests in which you might discern emerging shapes. Then he says it, out loud. Everything is itself. In fact, it's a bit of a scrummage of objects: a giant bottle of Ventolin syrup lies on its side amongst a drift of pills and stacked up packaging, offering words of baffling medical reassurance: Alendronic Acid, Chordiazepoxide... A huge, gleaming metal scalpel leans against a wall in mock-menace. 'For the Love of God’, a life-size cast in platinum of a human skull covered in more than 8000 diamonds, reminds us that, even when Hirst makes something beautiful, death, beauty, and evil are all constant presences. Hirst explores the theme of death from another angle in the assemblages in which he breeds flies and butterflies, allows them to gorge on blood, sugar and flowers, and then steps back to watch them die - either by flapping aimlessly around for their short life span or by flying into an insect-o-cutor. I began to think of Hirst’s career as a sort of perverse pilgrim’s progress, a weirdly inverted morality tale. The spiritual connotations are clear. Here, the narrow silver ledges of a mirrored cabinet are laid with all manner of sleeping pills in different hues and tones, beautifully tuned to each season. You can also choose to be emailed when someone replies to your comment. If that is true for you, then now is the ideal opportunity: the show covers 24 years and almost every phase. Hirst taps into both the apprehension and the awe we experience when we come face to face with alluring products which may soothe away our miseries. Not all of the animal and fish pieces work, but when they do they are mesmerising. But even the shark – smaller, its mouth wrenched open to make it appear as intimidating as the last – now looks as if it is yawning. You can find our Community Guidelines in full here. In the humid fug of an artificial paradise, huge butterflies feed on rotting fruit, procreate and hatch. He keeps returning to it, of course, reviving those allegories for the market he has created and sustained. Hirst starts from a premise: we are so inured to even the most graphic images of death that we no longer experience it as real. This retrospective feels honest, at least, in its incessant repetitions and candid self-exposure. The exact opposite of everything the skull stands for, this is the dove of peace, the Holy Spirit, love itself. From the modest scale of the earlier work the art becomes bigger, more colourful, and more excessive in every way. Dying, dead, long dead, still dead: there is no end to the end. In it, the carcasses of a calf and a cow are bisected laterally, and then placed in vitrines side by side. The spots continue all the way round the show, larger, smaller, more or less of them in each grid but always boring, a brand extended to ever-pricier decor. The bisected cows are fading like ghosts in their tanks of formaldehyde. What's new? Want an ad-free experience?Subscribe to Independent Premium. And then, what is more, everything Hirst makes is repeated. But it's an experience no longer to be had, at Tate Modern or anywhere else. One sees oneself in a haze looking at this potentially deadly promise of sleep; and one passes in an optical shudder. The fish in their cabinets head hopelessly in the same direction, dead and shelved these past 20 years, getting nowhere with their cloudy blind eyes. Richard Dorment reviews the Damien Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern. What there is, I think, is something akin to compassion. Where to go next? The gift was in the first flush: the shark, the flies, the paschal lamb in its celestial afterlife of silver bubbles. By preserving the carcasses of animals in formaldehyde and by then exhibiting them in glass vitrines in an art gallery, he found a remarkably effective way to bring us face to face with death’s emptiness, its finality, its silence. Create a commenting name to join the debate, There are no Independent Premium comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts, There are no comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts. And this seems a besetting problem with (and for) this exhibition, Hirst's first full-dress show in a public museum. By Richard Dorment 02 April 2012 • 12:22 pm . The medicine cabinets, for instance: all the mordant thoughts that could have been inspired by emphasising the pharmaceutical language, playing on the product names, creating tellingly nuanced arrays. And not many artists would end with a white dove in a tank, hovering like the Holy Ghost above the head of a missing Christ. Are you sure you want to mark this comment as inappropriate? Gallagher points out that most people have never seen the works except in reproduction. He has displayed entire walls of gleaming metal cabinets full of syringes, pills, pill boxes. The line extension of tanked creatures, spots and cabinets were a modus operandi from the start; always ahead of the game. Gallerist Paul Stolper had no idea what it meant - nor how to say it - when Damien Hirst first told him the brilliant idea he'd had for the title of this new gallery show of prints and sculptures, his first in a couple of years. So what does it mean? It is, however, the first major survey of his archetypal pieces. The gallery-sized installation 'Pharmacy’ adds another dimension to Hirst’s obsessive quest to wrest some meaning out of life. The art flies are visible from the entrance, crawling over the severed cow's head, obligingly fulfilling their destiny by eating, breeding and dying on the sizzling blue light in double-quick time – the cycle of mortality abruptly compressed. But if you have seen Hirst's work, considered it, formed opinions, then by definition this show presents two great obstacles, both of which are inherent to the work. Damien Hirst put his philosophical proposition across most powerfully with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living in 1991. From sliced-up cows to dead sharks, Damien Hirst is the master of statement, but his retrospective at the Tate shows how little of himself he reveals Hirst’s incredulity at the idea of a god who could allow pointless suffering is balanced by what I perceive as his longing to find some purpose, order or perhaps even redemption in our lives. Are you sure you want to delete this comment? On 7th June 1965, painter and sculptor Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England. They represent only their own meaning or menace. Giant rotating 'Spin’ paintings and a multi-coloured plastic beach ball kept precariously in the air by a blower simply say in different forms what Hirst has been saying all along: life is fragile, a matter of chance, so you may as well have some fun while you can. It allows our most engaged readers to debate the big issues, share their own experiences, discuss real-world solutions, and more. Even the spot paintings make a point, so to speak, of being dismally lifeless. Tate Modern has his strongest works, to be sure: the shark, the flies, the lost sheep in their isolation tanks: natural history with a metaphysical kick; the gigantic ashtray containing several bin liners of butts from those Groucho Club days when members could still chain it. One medicine cabinet, two medicine cabinets, 10 or 12; even the most resolute visitor, determined to make the effort to overcome hearsay, scepticism and perhaps previous disappointments of their own, may find their hopes defeated. The multiple editions turn out to have been a feature of Hirst's graduate show. We can't say we weren't warned. Hirst has often made work around the seductive allure of pharmaceuticals. Richard Dorment reviews the Damien Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern. A black sheep is a black sheep, a cabinet full of surgical instruments is surgical, clinical. For me, by far the most touching of the animal pieces is 'Away from the Flock’, a lamb captured by death in mid-frolic. To me it looks as though death caught each one by surprise. The cover of the Sotheby's sale catalogue is multiplied over and again to paper the walls, in the (exact) manner of Andy Warhol's cow wallpaper; another shark gets a black nightclub tank in which to lurk. That has been the steady line on Hirst for so long that one can scarcely remember when that flush was. Please continue to respect all commenters and create constructive debates. Such works are much more ambiguous and far more resistant to simplistic interpretation than they at first appear.

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