First exhibited in 1988, the “Spot” works, also known as the “Pharmaceutical Paintings” have become one of the art world’s most recognizable, classic images and they define the way much of our culture views contemporary and conceptual art. Initially conceived as a scientific approach to painting much like the drug companies’ scientific approach to life. As the series evolved, Hirst began to discover an intriguing link between painting, and psychological mood.
Contemporary British artist Damien Hirst’s (b.1965) œuvre is at once abstract, conceptual, romantic, baroque and minimal. Hirst, winner of the 1995 prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize, has been the most prominent and notorious member of the young British artists (YBAs). While still a student at Goldsmith's College in 1988, he curated the now renowned student exhibition, Freeze, featuring his friends' and his own work, and held in East London. With this exhibition, Hirst brought together a group of young artists who would come to define cutting-edge contemporary art in the 1990s. Hirst's work has generated enormous controversy, in part for its morbidity and fascination with medicine, which is evident in several of his series: the encased dead animals in various states of preservation, the incorporation of butterfly wings into stained glass-like images, cabinets filled with pharmaceuticals, and diamond-encrusted skulls. His art challenges the boundaries between high and low culture, art and science, and addresses the big questions of life, love, and death.

Select Public Collections:
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY)
Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY)
Tate Gallery (London, UK)
Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane, AU)