Damien Hirst was born June 7th in 1965 in Bristol and took part in a class in the field of “Fine Arts” from 1986 to ’89 at the Goldsmith College in London. Early on, he realized that he wanted to follow an artistic career. Drawing, painting, sculpturing but also video art and music fascinated him. In the mid-nineties, he and other British, young artists brought the project “Freeze” to life. Artworks dedicated to “Freeze” were exhibited in a warehouse in the Londoner dock area.
Since then, his fame has been rising constantly and seriously… no one has the right to call him dull and boring. Just look at his probably most famous artwork.
I’m talking about a tiger shark, 10 feet long, with a dangerous-looking gaping mouth full of sharp teeth. It is placed in a 6m-long tank made of steel and glass which is filled with formaldehyde. The shark is shown in a natural pose, while the preparation technique which was used represents a rather old-fashioned one, as it has been used 100 years ago for rather small preparations.
Damien Hirst received this special request in 1991 from Charles Saatchi who simply wanted an artwork by Hirst. The content and the topic were up to the artist. Subsequently, Hirst employed a shark hunter to hunt a tiger shark which cost him $6000 and injected formaldehyde into the dead animal to preserve it. Afterwards the entire tank including the frame was built which was filled with formaldehyde. The shark was put in it and the artwork was done.
After a while, the tiger shark did start to decompose because it partially came in contact with oxygen. Attempts to repair the damaged parts with the help of bleach failed. Thus, the cadaver had to be replaced with a new one.
Hirst wanted to illustrate the perspective of a human who only grasped the beauty of nature, when it was presented to them dead. He said: “This fucked up way to look at something and it’s already dead by the time when you look at it and you try to understand what was it like when it lived. That kind of contradictions, in a way like relationships, how people destroy each other. It’s a kind of what’s wrong with scientific approach or something.“
Today this artwork is estimated to be worth 9 million Euros. However, it received a lot of criticism from critiques who said that a dead fish is not an artwork, which applies to many of Hirst’s core works.
Many other animals followed the shark. A cow, a zebra and even a unicorn…
