Ocula Conversation Bani Abidi: ‘What you see in my films is what I know’ A group of voices accompanies me in the exhibition. They are singing words I cannot comprehend, yet the warm tunes are familiar: folk songs, love songs, songs of longing. There are letters, too. They speak of the quotidian details of a soldier's life: the hardness of the war, sending money to the family, and longing for familiar landscapes, food,...
Ocula Report Aichi to Okayama: Art in Japan Looks to the Future 11 Oct 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula There has been a flurry of triennial and biennial art activity in Japan this year. The Aichi Triennale opened in Nagoya this August, sparking a national debate about the shutting down of a display of formerly censored works—the result of public backlash against a burnt image of Emperor Hirohito and a statue commemorating the women forced into...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Damien Hirst is an internationally renowned contemporary artist. Hirst studied at Goldsmiths College, London and first gained recognition after curating the seminal show Freeze in 1988; the inaugural exhibition of the group of artists now known as the Young British Artists or YBAs. The exhibition established Hirst and his fellow students as among the most prominent artists of their generation.
Hirst works in a variety of media including installation, sculpture, painting, and drawing. Many of his works revolve around the central theme of death. Among his most notable works are The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark suspended in formaldehyde in a vitrine, and For the Love of God, a human skull completely encrusted in diamonds. Viewers of Hirst’s work are forced to confront their own fears surrounding mortality. His other enduring themes of religion, love, art, and science are also embodied in works equally challenging for which he has created his own motifs and vocabulary. Works range from cabinets of pills, spin paintings and works that use dead butterflies.
Damien Hirst was born in England where he continues to live and work. In 1995, he was the recipient of the Turner Prize. The first retrospective of Hirst’s work, The Agony and the Ecstasy, took place at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, in 2004. A later retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2012 recognized Hirst’s contributions to British art over the last three decades.
Hirst is also recognised as a disruptive player in the art world. This has involved consigning his own works to an auction house for a one vendor sale, to selling his own editions and multiples through a retail outlet called Other Criteria. Recently Hirst opened his own art gallery in London.
Hirst has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, London (2012); Musei di Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (2010); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2008); and Astrup Fearnley Museet fur Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2005). His work is held in major public and private collections around the world.
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Ocula Report A blended mass: A report from Art Basel 2016 24 Jun 2016 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula It was both a conservative and global year for the 47th Art Basel, as Scott Reyburn reported for The New York Times. Volatile markets—and politics—explained the wealth of historical pieces featured amongst more contemporary installations in Gianni Jetzer’s Unlimited section, this year with a record number of 88 works in total...
Related Press Damien Hirst, Turning In Circles Hyperallergic : 12 October 2019 LONDON — It's a hot mid-afternoon in the West End's posh Mayfair district, and Damien Hirst is standing outside the glass double-doors of the White Cube gallery, looking every inch the devil-may-care prankster out of some early Shakespearean comedy.
Related Press In Murakami’s Moscow, It’s All “Cuteness and Catastrophe” Vogue : 3 October 2017 In a 2000 interview with the Japanese photographer Mako Wakasa for the Journal of Contemporary Art, the artist Takashi Murakami presented the following rules for survival and success in the contemporary art market (best exemplified, he said, by Damien Hirst and the continued relevance of Picasso and Warhol): "First of all, distinctively...
Related Press Venice Notebook: Samplers From a Biennale Banquet The New York Times : 14 May 2017 The Biennale comprises a central exhibition, organized this year by Christine Macel, chief curator of the Pompidou Center in Paris; and 85 national pavilions, which feature solo or thematic presentations. Prizes are awarded to the best pavilion—this year it's Germany, which hosts a harrowing performance work by the young artist Anne...
Related Press Colossal Relics Aesthetica Magazine : 10 May 2017 The first major solo exhibition dedicated to the British artist Damien Hirst (b.1965) in Italy since his 2004 retrospective in Naples opens across the two Venetian venues of the Pinault Collection. Running concurrently to the Venice Biennale, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable is displayed across 5,000 square metres of the Palazzo Grassi,...
Related Video & Audio Inside the Stately Home Exhibiting Damien Hirst’s Most Iconic Works AnOther Magazine : 15 May 2018 The notion of 'Britishness' has long been underpinned by a tangle of contradictions; evocative of both the aristocratic establishment, and its countercultural underside.
