EDGAR – Damien hirst

ART

King Midas Damien Hirst has gone from angstfilled youth to the world’s richest living artist. Ahead of his exhibition in Qatar, the king of the art world spoke to Edgar about death, money and 14-foot sharks

BY Matthew Priest

WORDS: GARY EVANS. IMAGES: GETTY, REX FEATURES

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severed cow’s head lies in the middle of the floor.

Hundreds of flies surround it, some eating away while others lie lifeless in a pool of slightly congealing blood that seeps across the smooth concrete.

Suspended above this horrific scene is a quietly buzzing insect-o-cutor, occasionally hissing and crackling as another newly hatched fly fails to avoid the allure of its mesmeric bright light – and is killed stone dead.

This all sounds like a torturous scene best reserved for an R-rated horror film, not one of the showpiece sculptures in what last year became the most visited solo show in the history of London’s famous Tate Modern gallery, but it is.

This morbid vitrine-encased sculpture is just one of many that belongs to British artist Damien Hirst, arguably the world’s most famous – and richest – living artist and it will take pride of place at his first ever solo show in the Middle East this month at the Alriwaq Doha exhibition space in Qatar.

The exhibition, entitled Relics, will showcase the largest retrospective collection of Hirst’s work ever assembled, including several pieces from his infamous ‘Natural History’ series of animals preserved in formaldehyde; both of his diamond encrusted human skulls – For The Love Of God (2007) and For Heaven’s Sake (2008); and the aforementioned rotting cow’s head sculpture – A Thousand Years (1990) – which was one of the pieces that initially catapulted the mouthy Yorkshireman to art stardom back in the early 1990s.

In short, Relics will show an vast selection of the controversial and often criticised works which demonstrate the classic Hirstian trademarks – life and death; beauty and ugliness; the sacred and the profane – that over the past 25 years have led the disruptive, rebel artist to the very pinnacle of the contemporary art world.

“For me it comes down to whether people are actually talking about shock or fear,” says Hirst when Edgar asks whether his works are created with the intention to shock people. “Is trying to confront death actually shocking, or is it just frightening with shock being an inevitable byproduct?”

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“Originally, it was about wanting to change the world. I was at art school and I just realised that the work being produced at my college was more exciting than the work on show in the major museums,” he explains. “I only wanted to do it if it was as professional as possible, so we secured sponsorship and produced a catalogue, got an amazing space, and made sure the most important figures in London’s art scene came.” Hirst even went so far as to cheekily send a taxi to the house of Norman Rosenthal, the director of the Royal Academy in London, to make sure he came and saw the show.

Despite it being merely a student show, Freeze became the most talked-about art event of the year in London, attracting the attention of big-name collectors and gallery owners including Charles Saatchi and Nicholas Serota. Hirst was instantly marked out as someone to watch.

His first solo show, In And Out Of Love (1991), saw his creative imagination and love for spectacle blossom. Visitors entered a disused shop in central London to live butterflies flying around having just hatched from canvases embedded with cocoons. In the next room, dead butterflies were arranged on white canvases placed around a table with overflowing ashtrays. It was an early demonstration of the themes of life and death, mixed with beauty and horror that would become Hirst’s trademark throughout his most notable later works.

Perhaps the most notable of those was his landmark ‘shark in formaldehyde’ sculpture – The Physical Impossibility of Death in

“It is Only in the

context of a gallery do people find the themes of my work shocking”

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IMAGES: GETTY

“My ‘Natural History’ series is often described as ‘shocking’, but I initially took the concept from the idea of zoos, from the human desire to observe animals,” he explains. “I have always been fascinated by the Victorian’s predilection for killing things in order to look at them and a lot of my display cabinets and formaldehyde works reference that. In Britain many of the animals I use, like the cows in my work Mother and Child (Divided) (1993) – a four cabinet sculpture that consists of a cow and her calf, bisected lengthways and preserved in formaldehyde – are widely bred and slaughtered for food. In some ways, seeing that work is no different to being at the butchers, it’s only within the context of a gallery that it actually becomes shocking.”

It is a valid argument, and one that he has, no doubt, had to argue many times amid years of slights from art critics on the one hand and animal rights activists on the other. To that he simply claims that he “loves art that you can love and hate,” or more importantly “art that you can’t avoid.”

And avoiding Hirst’s work is something that has always been rather hard to do.

Never one to embrace subtlety, Hirst’s career started in the late 1980s as a 23-year-old art student at the University of London’s Goldsmiths College. There he conceived and curated Freeze, an art exhibition featuring works created by him and his classmates. The ballsy exhibition is widely regarded as the launching point not only for Hirst’s career, but for a generation of British artists.

to a lot of people. That’s why I needed the shark to be real and to be big enough to eat you, because you can try and avoid death but at the end of the day it’s just too big.”

“The prevalence of death in my work might seem morbid, but I’ve actually always hoped it will serve to invigorate people. A lot of it I see as more of a celebration of life rather than something bleak,” he explains.

Returning to his Doha show, Hirst mentions that he has recently finished working on a brand new shark piece, Leviathan (2006–2013), which has never been seen before, and is the largest he’s ever made.

“It focuses more on the darkness in your mind than something huge that’s out there and could actually devour you. I’ve been working on it for a long time and I’m very excited to show it in Qatar,” he says.

But whether the preservation of a shark does actually symbolise man coming to terms with his own mortality or not, the one indisputable fact that came out of Hirst’s original ‘shark sculpture’ was his elevation to artistic superstardom – and with it an enormously lucrative earning power.

Saatchi initially snapped up the sculpture for A Christie’s employee [left] Hirst’s ‘shark in AED 300,000, before selling it a decade later for a between the two halves of formaldehyde‘ sculpture is reported AED 29.3 million.

Hirst’s Away from the Flock considered to be one of the Hirst gained international recognition during the (Divided) sculpture great pieces of modern art mid-1990s as part of the angst-filled misfit group of British artists known as the YBAs (Young British Artists). The cocky, outspoken artist would be awarded the Turner Prize in 1995 for his work Two Fucking and Two Watching (1995), which featured rotting cows copulating via a hydraulic device. This was followed by even more money-spinning and critically lauded projects.

Now 48 years old, the father of three sons and one of Britain’s wealthiest citizens, he recalls those madcap days fondly – but also states how they are now very much in the past. “I remember once telling David Bowie that I would never want a show at the Tate Gallery, because at the time I felt it was a museum for dead artists,” he laughs. “But last year my exhibition there was the most visited solo show ever, and it was fantastic!”

Any doubt of Hirst’s status as the world’s most sought-after artist was dispelled at his Beautiful In My Head Forever auction at Sotheby’s in 2008, where he made a controversial decision to bypass traditional gallery involvement (and their commission fees) and sold 223 of his own pieces directly at auction. The total sales of the two-day event topped AED 647 million – 10 times higher than the previous record for work by a single artist.

“You have to respect money,” he says, when asked of the impact the enormous price tags have had on his career. But then, as if recalling his single-parent, working-class upbringing, he declares: “I hate people who have it and complain about it because there are so many people out there who haven’t got the Mind of Someone Living (1991). While most people saw the enough. Many of my works had this sense of feeling like King spectacle of the gigantic 14ft-long shark preserved in a glass case Midas – about being surrounded by a lot of money, when I had in its entirety, Hirst – as the title suggests – was more interested in grown up without any.” presenting the viewer with the experience of coming face-to-face But there is no doubting that having been able to monetise his with the full scale of nature’s quintessential killing machine. work from early on in his career, the lack of the usual financial “For me, death is an unacceptable idea,” he explains when burden that artists suffer has enabled him to push the boundaries asked why so much of his work always comes back to the idea of of his art – if only in terms of size and scale. death. “In life, we can’t really comprehend the concept of our own “Although the wealth has obviously given me a huge measure mortality and a lot of my work is about this fundamental difficulty. of creative freedom, it’s not why I make the work,” he says.

The shark sculpture was an attempt to describe that feeling – that “The money has enabled me to create new works on a scale ultimate fear of death. Even the idea of the fear itself is terrifying that would have been inconceivable to me 20 years ago.

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Hirst in front of one of his hundreds of Spots paintings

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“I said all sorts of crazy things when I was younger,” he says when reminded of the statement.

“That comment about ‘bad art’ probably came more out of some general thoughts on the art world and the strange nature of value.

Everything is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and taste is acquired. I think I was trying to say that what is bad this week is considered good next week and there are no rules.”

And perhaps that is it. With his constant desire to create bigger and more adventurous works, Hirst reminds the world that art has no boundaries – it is a lesson for which he has been richly rewarded.

So whether you like him or loate him, one thing is undeniable, in this world where there are no rules, Damien Hirst is king.

Fire Sale The three art works that Hirst would save from a fire 1. A Thousand Years (1990) The cow’s head and flies encased in a vitrine. When British painter Lucian Freud first saw it he said, “I think you’ve started with the final act.” It was the first work I made which I truly felt was about something ‘real’.

2. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) The shark sculpture was an attempt to describe the ultimate fear of death. Even the idea of the fear itself is terrifying to a lot of people.

3. For the Love of God (2007) The diamond skull. To me it felt like a measure of victory over death. Even though it acts as a memento mori, in many ways it’s the most alive piece I’ve ever done.

IMAGE: DAVID JOHNSON/CORBIS OUTLINE

The diamond skulls wouldn’t have been possible without that success. Recently, I’ve been working on an enormous installation project that brings together 100 sculptures, based on the idea of a shipwreck. It’s the scale of the project that is inspiring and exciting me now.”

But while viscerally brash sculptures such as the cow’s head or the diamond encrusted skulls grab all the headlines and spark frantic bidding wars, surprisingly it’s Hirst’s light-hearted, massproduced Spot paintings that are his real money spinners.

“The spots were started as a conceptually endless series, and I just fell in love with the happiness of the end product,” he says. “No painting contains two spots of the same colour and the whole point is that they are made by a person trying to paint like a machine. Each is titled after a different pharmaceutical drug, this scientific approach mirrors the way drugs companies approach life: I made enough paintings to get at that idea.”

And by enough, he is not exaggerating, having claimed to have lost count of how many hundreds of these paintings have been produced – ranging in size from A4 size pieces to ones that cover entire gallery walls. However, like all of Hirst’s work, it has its critics. There are grumbles that via his company Science Ltd. – and its almost 160 employees – Hirst has turned his art into to a consumerist empire, churning out Spot and Spin paintings on such a vast scale that it would make Andy Warhol blush.

“I don’t see how they can be criticised: all children love them, and they are our greatest critics. I just wanted to create a formula for something that was unfailingly joyful,” surprising to hear from a man who once claimed that he ‘couldn’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it’.

But it is clear to see that having bested the best that the art world can throw at him, these days Hirst seems to have mellowed somewhat. Gone is the brazen, angst-filled punkrock artist of his youth, replaced by a more considerate man seemingly enjoying his middle years.