Damien Hirst, one of the most successful and expensive artists of our time, encrusted the skull of a newborn baby with eight thousand white and pink diamonds and called this work "For God's sake" (For Heaven's Sake).
In 2007, Hirst, whose death is the central theme of all his work, already showed the public one diamond skull - however, an adult. The work, called "For the Love of God" (For the Love of God) and adorned with 8601 diamonds, was valued at $ 100 million. It is currently owned by a consortium of investors, which includes Hurst himself, his manager Frank Dunphy and Ukrainian philanthropist Viktor Pinchuk. The diamond skull left London for the first time in December last year: before that, not a single museum in the world could cover the cost of its insurance. In particular, because of this, the tour of this work by Hirst in the Hermitage was disrupted.
The premiere of the skull "For God's sake" will take place on January 18 in Hong Kong, in the Asian branch of the Larry Gagosian Gallery. The cost of insurance, as well as the cost of materials, are still kept secret. It is only known that the precious stones were provided by the suppliers of the British royal court, jewelers Bentley & Skinner, and the skull was part of the collection of the 19th century cabinet of curiosities bought by the artist.
Hirst claims that the idea of encrusting human skulls came to him under the influence of the art of the ancient Aztecs.
"For me, this is a way to celebrate the opposition to death. When you look at the skull, you think that this is a symbol of the end, but if the end is so beautiful, then it inspires hope. And diamonds are perfection, clarity, wealth, sex, death and immortality. They symbolize eternity, but they also have a dark side," says the artist.
Forty-five-year-old Briton Hurst made an incredible career in death. His most famous series is called "Natural History" (Natural History) - a variety of living beings in formalin. The most famous was the alcoholized shark (1992) with the label "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", subsequently sold for $ 12 million. True, the artist promised to refuse formaldehyde in the future, stating, that dead animals no longer shock people, and that the best way to shock an audience is to pick up a brush.
Neon skull, cocaine skull, crystal, diamond, typewriter and bicycle skulls - in short, welcome to our collection of the most outstanding skull art.
The skull is a symbol of death, the perishability of being. For many centuries, like everything mysterious and dark, it has attracted people, instilled horror and awe in their minds and hearts. Many figures of contemporary art dedicated their work to this radical theme.
A famous work of art that could not escape our gaze. Hirst called it "For the Love of God" (For the Love of God), directly alluding to one of the books of the New Testament. The work used more than 8,600 diamonds, as well as a huge diamond. The skull was sold for $100 million.
Neon, krypton, mercury, glass - this is the recipe for creating such impressive works of art by the American artist. Franklin sends viewers to the depths of human nature, forcing them to think about how the mind and body can form a single whole. These thoughts are especially vividly illustrated in the full-size works of the artist (human skeletons).
Scary, but at the same time fascinating work. The deer skull was complemented with parts from a regular bicycle - as you can see, the spokes fit perfectly into the image.
Mark Grieve, in collaboration with Ilana Spektor, often participate in various charity events. So this work became part of the "pART" project, organized by a company that produces spare parts for bicycles. The proceeds were donated to charities in Africa.
No welding or glue - this is one of the key features of Jeremy's works. "I collect old vintage typewriters, mostly in non-working condition. To do this, I often go to sales, look at flea markets and antique shops. Many typewriters are brought to me by friends," Mayer says on his website. "When dismantling typewriters, I never use tools - I'm afraid of damaging something," adds the artist.
Dutch artist Diddo has created perhaps the most controversial skull in the world. It is made from cocaine in the truest sense of the word, and of the highest quality. For this, "street coke" was purified in a special laboratory. The work took 20 months.
Diddo himself puts deep meaning into his works. Here is what he writes about the "Cocaine Skull": "We lived in conditions of fear and need. Then we became" people ", trying to improve ourselves. We learned to control the environment, but the fear remained. Our inner beast is still at large".
Lauren has a whole series of works with animal skulls. This particular one was inspired by the "Amazon jungle and the Day of the Dead" (a holiday in Central America dedicated to the memory of the dead). In January of this year, an exhibition with this exhibit was just held in London.
This work uses over 27,000 small multi-colored pieces, each of which is "glued" by hand. The whole process took 310 hours. Baker refers to the subconscious, the work of the brain, the "colorfulness" of thoughts and ideas.
There are many handmade skulls on Skullis.com. Most of them are real works of art - or at least a chic addition to the interior. Skullis only makes skulls, and only from crystal and precious stones. The company is the absolute leader in its niche.
The German artist creates radical, frightening sculptures, which, however, do not get tired of admiring. The first work is called "God Of The Grove". It uses gold-plated brass and marble as main materials.
Sandt completes the theme of beauty and death with another series of works. This time, a gilded replica of an 18th-century human skull is held in the "vice" of an unusual fixture.
In his works, the Danish artist reveals the idea of the perishability of our life. Death is always near. Whatever we do, wherever we live, no matter how we live, the “foundation” is always the same. All the details in the presented works were found or bought in different places and only seem to be a single whole. The final step for Mikkelsen is always covering the "miniature" with a layer of silver or gold.
The name of the artist perfectly reflects his main passion. Sometimes bright, sometimes gloomy, his work is always with a touch of mysticism and the underworld. Jim has traveled to many countries and all continents. In his works, rites, rituals and religious traditions of the peoples of Africa, Australia, America, Oceania are mixed in a bizarre and original way.
Those who share the tastes of Jim Skull should definitely buy themselves a couple of cool items on the "skull" theme - for example, or.
Damien Hirst still knows how to shock the audience. Mankind has just got used to the existence of a platinum skull, studded with diamonds, worth 100 million dollars, and Hirst is already making a new slap in the face of public opinion and public taste. He creates another similar skull, but not an adult, but a child.
The very name of Damien Hirst in recent years has become a brand with a value comparable to the price of a controlling stake in a large multinational corporation. Everything that this creator has applied to will be sold for fabulous money, whether it is the carcass of a dead cow or decorated in the style of a blunder.
And, with each new work of his, warmed up by the attention of the public and billionaire collectors, Hirst becomes more and more provocative, outrageous and tough. So creativity brings more money.
Here, the main thing is not to keep yourself within the limits. And, if people "ate" a very controversial piece of jewelry in the form of a platinum skull, and someone even gave a hundred million dollars to it, then you can continue to exploit this topic, but at a new level.
So Damien Hirst created his new work - another precious skull, but this time for a child. Anthropologists say that the child who could own this platinum skull, studded with eight thousand white and pink diamonds, would be about two weeks old. And this is a very controversial creative step, even for Hirst.
And, despite the fact that this work called "For Heaven's Sake" ("For God's Sake") has not yet been officially presented to the public, disapproving voices of various public organizations are already heard around the world, who believe that its author has encroached on the sacred - on children. However, maybe this stream of negativity is also a pre-prepared marketing campaign aimed at promoting Hirst's new work. After all, the more loud criticism, the more expensive his works will be sold.
And for public viewing, this precious baby skull will be on display for the first time later this month at the Gagosian Gallery showroom in Hong Kong.
Text: Ksyusha Petrova
Today in the Moscow Gary Tatintsyan Gallery opens the first exhibition since 2006 of Damien Hirst, a British artist who is not in vain called "the great and terrible", comparing either with the geniuses of the Renaissance, or with the sharks from Wall Street. Hirst is considered the richest living author, which only fuels controversy around his work. Ever since Charles Saatchi literally stared with his mouth open at the installation " A Thousand Years" - a spectacular and gloomy illustration of the entire life path from birth to death - the noise around the creative methods and aesthetic value of Hirst's work has not subsided, which the artist himself, of course, is only happy about . We tell why Hirst's works are really worthy of the huge attention that they get, and we try to understand the inner world of the artist - much more ambiguous and subtle than it might seem from the outside.
Away from the Flock, 1994
Hirst is now fifty-one, and ten years ago he completely gave up smoking, drugs and alcohol - chances are good that his career will last for several more decades. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine what could be the next step for an artist of this magnitude - Hirst has already represented his country at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in London, shot a video for the Blur group, made the most expensive work of art in the world (a platinum skull encrusted with diamonds), in workshops on it employs more than one hundred and sixty employees (Andy Warhol never dreamed of such a thing with his “Factory”), and his fortune exceeds a billion dollars. The image of a brawler that made Hirst famous, along with his series of alcoholized animals in the 1990s, gradually changed to a calmer one: although the artist still loves leather pants and rings with skulls, he has not shown his penis to strangers for a long time, as he did in the “years of military glory ”, and more and more like a successful entrepreneur than a rock star, although in fact he is both.
Hirst explains his extraordinary commercial success by the fact that he had more motivation to earn money than the rest of the members of the Young British Artists association he headed (while still studying at Goldsmiths, Hirst organized the legendary Freeze exhibition, which attracted the attention of eminent gallery owners to young artists ). Hirst's childhood cannot be called secure and happy: he never saw his biological father, his stepfather left the family when the boy was twelve, and his Catholic mother desperately resisted her son's attempts to become part of the then very young punk subculture.
Nevertheless, she supported his art classes - perhaps out of desperation, because Hirst was a difficult teenager and all subjects, except for drawing, were given to him with difficulty. Damien regularly got caught in petty shoplifting and other unpleasant stories, but at the same time he managed to sketch in the local morgue and study medical atlases, which were the source of inspiration for his favorite author, the gloomy expressionist Francis Bacon. Bacon's paintings had a strong influence on Hirst: the grin of the famous alcoholized shark resembles the motif of Bacon's mouth opened in a cry, rectangular aquariums are cages and pedestals that are constantly found on Bacon's canvases.
A few years ago, Hirst, who had never performed on the field of traditional painting, presented to the public a series of his own paintings, clearly inspired by the works of Bacon, and failed miserably: critics called Hirst's new works a pathetic parody of the master's paintings and compared them with "a daub of a freshman who does not submit great hopes." Perhaps these scathing reviews hurt the artist's feelings, but clearly did not affect his productivity: with the help of assistants who do all the routine work, Hirst continues his endless series of canvases with multi-colored dots, “rotational” paintings created by scrolling cans of paint in a centrifuge, installations with tablets and on an industrial scale produces excellent selling works.
← «Untitled AAA», 1992
Although Hirst has always said that money is primarily a means to produce art on a large scale, it cannot be denied that he has an extraordinary talent for entrepreneurship - equal, if not superior in scale to artistic talent. The Briton, who is not modest, believes that everything he touches turns into gold - and this seems to be true: even in the depressive 2008, the two-day auction of his works organized by Hirst at Sotheby's, organized by Hirst, exceeded all expectations and broke the Picasso auction record. Hirst, who looks like a simple guy from Leeds, does not hesitate to make money on objects that seem to be alien to high art - be it six thousand dollar souvenir skateboards or a trendy London restaurant "Pharmacy", designed in the spirit of the artist's "pharmacy" series. Buyers of Hirst's works are not only Oxford graduates from good families, but also a new layer of collectors - those who came from the bottom and made a fortune from scratch, like the artist himself.
Hirst's celebrity status and the dizzying cost of his work often make it difficult to discern their essence - which is a shame, because the ideas embedded in them are no less impressive than sawn cow carcasses in formaldehyde. Even in what seems to be 100% kitsch, Hirst has an irony: his famous diamond-studded skull, sold for a hundred million dollars, is called "For the Love of God" (an expression that can be literally translated as "In the name of the love of God" as the curse of a tired person: "Well, for the love of all that is holy!"). According to the artist, he was inspired to create this work by the words of his mother, who once asked: “God have mercy, what are you going to do next?” (“For the love of God, what are you going to do next?”). Cigarette butts, with maniacal pedantry laid out in a window, are a way of calculating the life time: like animals in formalin, and a diamond skull, referring to the classic plot of memento mori, smoked cigarettes remind of the frailty of existence, which, with all our desire, is not able to capture our mind. And multi-colored mugs, and cigarette butts, and shelves with medicines - an attempt to streamline what separates us from death, to express the sharpness of being in this body and in this consciousness, which can break off at any moment.
"Claustrophobia/Agoraphobia", 2008
In his interviews, Hirst increasingly says that in his youth he felt eternal, and now the theme of death for him has many other nuances. “Mate, my eldest son, Connor, is already sixteen. Several of my friends have already died, and I am getting old, - explains the artist. “I’m not the bastard who tried to yell at the whole world anymore.” A staunch atheist, Hirst regularly returns to religious subjects, ruthlessly dissecting them and stating over and over again that the existence of God is impossible in the same way as "death in the mind of the living."
A series of works with living and dead butterflies embody the artist's reflections on beauty and its fragility. This idea is most clearly expressed in the installation “In and Out of Love”: several thousand butterflies hatch from cocoons, live and die in the space of the gallery, and their bodies stuck to canvases remain as a reminder of the fragility of beauty. Like the works of the old masters, it is desirable to see Hirst’s works at least once live: both the memetic “Physical impossibility of death in the mind of the living”, and “Separated mother and child” produce a completely different impression if you stand next to them. These and other works from the Natural History series are not a provocation for the sake of a provocation, but a thoughtful and lyrical statement about the fundamental questions of human existence.
As Hirst himself says, in art, as in everything we do, there is only one idea - the search for an answer to the main questions of philosophy: where did we come from, where are we going and does it make sense? A drunken shark, inspired by Hirst's childhood memories of the horror movie "Jaws", confronts our consciousness with a paradox: why do we feel uncomfortable next to the carcass of a deadly animal, because we know that it cannot harm us? Is what we feel one of the manifestations of an irrational fear of death that always looms somewhere on the edge of consciousness - and if so, how does this affect our actions and everyday life?
Hirst has been repeatedly criticized for his creative methods and harsh statements: for example, in 2002, the artist had to make a public apology for comparing the September 11 attacks to the artistic process. The living classic condemned Hirst for not doing the work with his own hands, but using the work of assistants, and the critic Julian Spalding even coined the parody term "Con Art", which can be translated as "conceptualism for suckers." It cannot be said that all the indignant cries against Hirst were groundless: the artist was repeatedly convicted of plagiarism, and also accused of artificially inflating prices for his works, not to mention the statements of the Society for the Protection of Animal Rights, which was worried about the conditions of keeping butterflies in the museum . Perhaps the most absurd conflict associated with the name of the scandalous Briton is his confrontation with the sixteen-year-old artist Carthraine, who was selling collages with a photograph of Hirst's "For the Love of God." The multi-millionaire artist sued the teenager for two hundred pounds, which he earned on his collages, which caused outrage among the representatives of the art market.
← Enchanted, 2008
Hirst's conceptualism is not as soulless as it might seem: indeed, the artist gives birth to an idea, and dozens of his nameless assistants are involved in the embodiment - however, practice shows that Hirst really cares about the fate of his works. The case of the same alcoholized shark that began to decompose has become one of the favorite anecdotes of the art world. Charles Saatchi decided to save the work by stretching the skin of the long-suffering fish on an artificial frame, but Hirst rejected the reworked work, saying that it no longer makes such an awesome impression. As a result, the already damaged installation was sold for twelve million dollars, but at the insistence of the artist, the shark was replaced.
Hirst's YBA friend and colleague Matt Collishaw describes him as "a hooligan and an aesthete", and if everything is clear with the hooligan part, then the aesthetic side is often forgotten: perhaps Hirst's extraordinary artistic flair can only be appreciated in expositions of works from his extensive
Like the last one, the new skull is cast in platinum and set with white and pink diamonds. However, Hirst's new work is the skull of a baby, and, accordingly, it is smaller in size than the skull For the love of God, according to The Art Newspaper.Hirst's new creation will be the centerpiece of the first exhibition at the new Larry Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong, opening January 18th. The cost of the skull is not called.
Scull For the love of God- one of the most famous works of Damien Hirst. It was made in 2007, and the cost of the materials used in its manufacture was about 15 million pounds (the skull is encrusted with more than 8600 diamonds).
In 2008 Hirst sold the skull for 50 million pounds, and, according to the artist, they paid for the skull in cash, that is, he did not have any evidence of its sale. Moreover, according to some sources, the artist himself was among the investors who paid for the purchase.
In 2009, information appeared in the media that the Ukrainian businessman and philanthropist Viktor Pinchuk was also a co-owner of the skull, but Pinchuk's representatives neither confirmed nor denied this information.
Damien Hirst is considered not only the most expensive, but also the richest living artist. His fortune is estimated at more than 200 million pounds. The theme of death is one of the central ones in Hirst's work.
