ABOUT

Damien Hirst is the defining provocateur of his generation — the figurehead of the Young British Artists who reshaped the London art world in the late 1980s and rewrote the rules of what contemporary art could be, sell for, and get away with.

His practice is built on confrontation: dead animals suspended in formaldehyde; spot paintings that are deliberately mass-produced yet sell for millions; and *For the Love of God* (2007), a platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, which collapsed vanity, death, and obscene wealth into a single object. Across all of it, Hirst returns obsessively to the same themes — religion, desire, and mortality, the one subject that money cannot resolve, however much is thrown at the problem.

His ascent began in 1988, when, still a student at Goldsmiths College, he curated *Freeze*, a self-organized show that launched the YBA movement. Major retrospectives followed at Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In 2008, bypassing galleries entirely, he staged “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” at Sotheby's — a direct-to-market auction that generated approximately $200 million and remains one of the most audacious acts of self-promotion in art world history.