Damien Hirst

(Bristol, United Kingdom, 1957)

Plastic artist with an artistic career marked by transgression. He is the most prominent member of The Young British Artists (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. Provocation and scandal define his work; In his most famous series he showed animal corpses placed in steel and glass tanks preserved in formaldehyde, with the aim of creating a "zoo of dead animals" and reflecting on the mechanisms of visualization, defining the space of the work, at the same time. time to wonder about the fragility of existence. Since its inception it has defied convention, its first major international presentation was at the Venice Biennale in 1993 with Mother and Child Divided, a cow and calf cut into sections and displayed in a series of separate display cases. A Thousand Years, one of Hirst's most provocative and engaging works, contains a real-life cycle. The worms hatch inside a white box, turning into flies, then feed on a severed bloody cow's head on the floor of a glass display case. The marketing of his production is another axis of transgression, he is the richest living artist in the United Kingdom, due to the eccentricity of his staging, an example of this is the sale of a complete exhibition, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, by auction at Sotheby's. In 1995, he won the Turner Prize.

The last Supper is one of Hirst's serigraphs that Medilab exhibited as part of Banquete. The images are derived from pharmaceutical packaging. Hirst has replaced the name of the drug with the name of a traditional food from working-class British cafe culture, for example 'corned beef' and 'sausages', transforming the food into a brand by adding the insignia ®, TM or decorative. typescript. Such variations on the artist's name as Hirst, Hirst (Damien, Damien, Damien & Hirst, Hirst Products Limited, also established in a variety of typescripts, have replaced the usual logo of the drug manufacturer.) Additional humor is created by a logo in the shape of a penis in a black circle over Hirst's name, parodying the brand logos that companies commission to reflect their corporate identities.