Damien Hirst and Science Ltd
Though he remains “Britain’s richest artist”, Damien Hirst has been through something of a “fallow period” in recent years, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Where once it seemed his work could only shoot up in value, his commercial and critical standing have taken a dive lately, and it has been reported that he has been laying off staff. But if Hirst is down, he is not out, and last week, on the very day that Covid-19 restrictions began to be relaxed in England, he opened the first of a year-long programme of exhibitions at London’s Gagosian Britannia Street. Composed of 41 works created between 1993 and the present day,
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“A photograph is from a moment. Painting is about stopping to look at the world, considering it, and giving it more importance,” Damien Hirst once stated. Hirst started working on his iconic
Fact painting series in 2000. His mission with this project was to reproduce photographs in realistic detail through oil paintings on canvas as way to trick onlookers a thought-provoking endeavor that champions his studio practice of challenging societal norms and consumerism.
Hirst mimicked numerous color photographs in this series and then went on to focus on developing three-dimensional objects under a similar series entitled
Fact Sculptures. Instead of just building intricate replicas of real objects, Hirst pairs unlikely pieces to shed light on the absurdity of their respective definitions. Take, for instance, his