Damien Hirst: Prints
8/ ART GALLERY/ Tomio Koyama Gallery, Shibuya Hikarie 8F
Feb. 3 (Wed.) – Feb. 29 (Mon.), 2015
Venue hours : 11:00 – 20:00
Open everyday during exhibitions
Free Admissions

http://www.hikarie8.com/artgallery/2016/02/damienhirst.shtml

Damien Hirst is one of the major representative artists of the contemporary age. First exhibited in the early 1990s, his huge shark pickled in formalin was a sensational and provocative artwork, while of course it also shocked the art world and viewers at the time. As a central artist within the YBAs (Young British Artists), Hirst has carved out his name within contemporary art history, with works inspiring conviction in the new possibilities for artistic expression. Concurrently with Hirst’s se- quences of work dealing with themes of life and death, he has also been creating an aesthetic world that is thoroughly systematized and rationalized.

In this exhibition, Hirst will present ‘In a Spin, the Action of the World on Things, Volume I’ (23 spin etchings, in a limited edition of 68). In this series the artist worked on rotating plates with needles and screwdrivers to create the etching plates. Due to the rapid revolution of the plates, together with a systematical range of circles the prints contain an irregularly spreading field of paint, as though the artist’s sharp sensitivity is being diffused from within the picture plane to the outside world.

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England, in 1965. After finished working on construction sites in London where he moved in 1984, he studied fine art at Goldsmiths College from 1986 – 1989. While a student in 1986, he began creating his first “Spot Paintings” series. In 1988, he orchestrated the student group show “Freeze”, which became the impetus by which not only Hirst’s name, but also those of the YBAs throughout the world. In 1995, his work “Mother and Child Divided”, an adult cow and its calf, each split exactly into two halves and submerged in formalin, won the Turner Prize, what is considered the most important award in the contemporary art world. In another work, “For the Love of God”, a skull is studded with several thousand diamonds. Life and death, religion, beauty, science and other concerns are consistently developed and worked into Hirst’s practice. He has staged over 80 solo exhibitions and over 250 group exhibitions worldwide to date, and in 2012 Tate Modern presented his retrospective exhibition.