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.
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 looked at the installation “A Thousand Years” with his mouth open - 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 in 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 life time: like animals in formalin, and a diamond skull, referring to the classic memento mori plot, 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 criticized more than once 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
One of the most expensive and most scandalous artists Damien Hirst, according to RIA Novosti, made another skull encrusted with diamonds. This time - a newborn baby...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 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.
That's all love, gentlemen... Sculpture "For the love of the Lord"
Sculpture "For the love of the Lord", 2007.
The diamond skull is the most expensive piece of art by a living artist.
The sculpture, made by the famous British artist Damien Hirst from 2 kg of platinum, is a slightly reduced copy of the skull of a 35-year-old European of the 18th century. The cells for diamonds (8601 in total) are laser cut, the jaw is made of platinum, and real teeth are inserted. The skull is crowned with a pink diamond weighing 52.4 carats. The work cost the British artist, famous for his scandalous installations using animal corpses in formalin, £14 million.
Hirst claimed that the name of the sculpture was inspired by the words of the mother when she turned to him with the question: For the love of God, what are you going to do next? ("For God's sake, what are you doing now?"). For the love of God is a literal quote from the First Epistle of John.
In 2007, the skull was exhibited at the White Cube Gallery and sold for $100m (£50m) the same year. Bloomberg and The Washington Post wrote that Damien Hirst himself, as well as Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk, were among the investors. A representative of the White Cube gallery did not comment on the rumors, but said that the buyers intend to subsequently resell Hirst's work.
The author of this truly barbaric beauty is the first provocateur of British contemporary art, Damien Hirst.
One of the leading figures in British contemporary art Damien Hirst was born on June 7, 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. His father left the family when Damien was twelve years old, he was a mechanic and car salesman, his mother worked in a consulting office. Despite his apparently antisocial lifestyle, Hirst attended Leeds Art College and later studied art at the University of London.
Damien Hirst was first mentioned in 1988 as a young impresario for an exposition called Freeze.
His first solo exhibition was held in 1991 in London, and soon two more exhibitions took place - at the Institute of Modern Art and at the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in Paris.
Damien Hirst is one of the most expensive and outrageous living artists. His works are a challenge to society, shock, delight and disgust, for which collectors pay millions of dollars. The central theme in Hirst's work is death. Widely known for his paintings, "painted" with a dense layer of flies, butterflies and other representatives of the fauna. Hirst's landmark work "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living": a tiger shark in an aquarium with formaldehyde.
The creator of masterpieces of modern art revealed to the world an art object called For the love of God ("For the love of God") - the skull of a 35-year-old European who lived between 1720 and 1810.
The skull is adorned with 8,601 diamonds totaling 1,106.18 carats and worth £14 million, and a large pink diamond flaunts in the center of the "composition". It cost Hearst about twenty million dollars. Experts have already called this exhibit the most expensive work of contemporary art.
According to the artist, all diamonds belong to the so-called conflict-free diamonds group, i.e. no child labor was used during their extraction and processing, slavery and other forms of violence and infringement of human rights were not used. So, all this supremely humane splendor is attached to the skull with the help of a platinum frame.
To begin with, Damien took an 18th century skull, one of the central diamonds can be seen nearby, then a platinum cast of the skull was made, in which cells for diamonds were made by laser. The diamonds were carefully inserted into the cells and fixed, at which time the teeth were pulled out of the original skull and washed, and platinum teeth were presented to the skull as a token of gratitude. At this time, the lower jaw was made, the pink diamond takes its place of honor 
Ukrainian businessman Pinchuk watches as British artist Hirst creates one of his pieces at a contemporary art center 
British artist Damien Hirst poses next to one of his works in Kyiv. (© Konstantin Chernichkin / Reuters/REUTERS)
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