Damien Hirst Retrospective at Tate Modern
Damien Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today and has created some of the most iconic works in recent history, including the instantly recognisable diamond encrusted skull, For the Love of God.
The Tate Modern, London, UK, is currently presenting the first substantial survey of Damien Hirst’s work ever held in the UK.
Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated Freeze, an exhibition of his own work and that of his friends and fellow Goldsmiths College students, staged in a disused London warehouse. Many of the works he created at that time will be on display at Tate Modern for the first time since the 1980s. In the nearly quarter of a century since then, Hirst has gone on to become one of the most influential artists of his generation.
Bringing together over seventy of the artist’s seminal works, the exhibition includes key sculptures from the early 1990s, including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, in which a deceased shark is held in formaldehyde (a colourless, pungent gas at room temperature) and suspended; and Mother and Child Divided, a four-part sculpture of a bisected cow and calf. Also on show are important vitrines, such as A Thousand Years 1990, in which the cycle of life is represented by a cow’s head, flies and insect-o-cutor.
Damien Hirst runs until Sunday 9 September 2012 at the Tate Modern, London, UK.
