Damien Hirst – End of a Century
A show → by the artist → of his own works → in his own gallery.
Written by Craig Berry
Designer & Writer
Please note: Viewer discretion is advised.
Dissected sharks, suspended animals, colourful spots, butterflies, pills and cabinets; the visual trademarks of the iconic (and contentious) British artist Damien Hirst and all on show at Hirst’s own Newport Street Gallery (a beautiful building inside and out, worth checking out itself) as part of Hirst’s exhibition End of a Century.
It sounds egotistical to have a show of your own work in your own gallery, and it probably is, but that’s Hirst’s style. In his own words “You need a big ego to be an artist”.
‘End of a Century’ is not a regular Damien Hirst exhibition, as usually, he shows a series of works together around a theme or a medium such as at White Cube Mason’s Yard in 2019 with a series of Mandala paintings artworks or at the Gagosianin 2018 with a series of Colour Space paintings. Whereas this exhibition brings together over 50 artworks across his catalogue but mostly from his formative years as a student in the 1980s at Goldsmiths College of Art and then as he became one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists during the 1990s along with his Young British Artist (YBA) fellows.
I’ve previously written pieces about or including YBA artists such as Gavin Turk (in 2017) and Rachel Whiteread (in 2018) where I also gave some backstory to what the YBA’s are/were.
“Rarely exhibited together, the works in ‘End of a Century’ will chart the emergence of Hirst’s most famous themes. Throughout his career, Hirst has reflected on the complex relationships between beauty, religion, science, life and death.”
Newport Street Gallery on End of a Century exhibition.
I visited the exhibition (actually on its opening day) in October 2020 and since then the exhibition has closed twice due to COVID lockdown rules in London and the UK but as of May 18 2021 the exhibition is back open and on until 12 June 2021; which isn’t long, but in my opinion, it’s worth the trip.
As such, I wanted to give my recap of the exhibition with my favourite series and pieces. During the second closure, Hirst featured most of the artworks on show on his Instagram, giving a small personal insight into each piece which I’ve also included parts of here.
Preserved and dissected sharks (and other animals) are probably Hirst’s most known artworks and are what arguably gave him the recognition he has today with the most famous of these being The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). These works involve the animal’s carcass being immersed in formaldehyde in a clear case aka a vitrine*.
“*A large, glass cabinet used for displaying art objects. Hirst’s use of vitrines to contain and present objects recalls the glass and plexiglass cases protecting and elevating ordinary consumer objects to the status of high art in works made by American Pop artist Jeff Koons (born 1955) during the 1980s (see T06991 and AR00077). However, where Koons fetishises such objects as vacuum cleaners and basketballs, Hirst expresses more metaphysical concerns”
Tate definition of vitrines.
Much of Hirst’s work revolves around the theme of death and mortality through the use of dead animals, skeletons, skulls and medicinal paraphernalia. When asked about the theme of death in his work he said “It’s every artist’s main theme. There isn’t really anything else. It just depends how far you stand back from it.”
The example on show at End of a Century is front and centre; you can’t miss it as you enter the museum building, it’s right there, Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded (1993) is a small shark chopped into three with each part in its own vitrine. This was my first time seeing one of these vitrines and it was definitely an eye-opening moment; almost like seeing a famous person in real life. I remember it being very dull in colour both the carcass and the ‘liquid’ but from an art perspective it was fascinating; to the ability to present and show something that you would never normally be able to see and have it sitting in a gallery space.
“I loved those three words, Explored, Explained, Exploded — you get an exploded diagram if you buy a chair from Ikea. I really love the idea that you can take something apart and present it in its element like a diagram. I love that kind of way of cutting — it’s violent, killing things to look at them…. In science there’s been a lot of death and horror in order to understand the world we live in… it seems really ridiculous that you create death in order to understand life, so this piece was about that.”
Damien Hirst about Explored, Explained, Exploded.
This isn’t the only vitrine work on show however, also here is Waster (1997) which in the current pandemic seems relevant as it a container filled with unused medical supplies; gloves, masks, syringes, bandages aka sterile waste, is it some kind of comment on how much waste is produced by hospitals to keep people alive?
“I love the disposable… I love that there’s this disposable aspect of life and in a way, I guess, people are disposable.”
Damien Hirst about Waster.
Another vitrine is the more gruesome A Hundred Years (1990). It’s as powerful (and as far as I can tell, pretty much the same) as the more known A Thousand Years (1990) and it is a strong image of life and death. Made up of two containers; one has a cube filled with maggots that grow and become flies, moving into the other to feast on a bloody, severed, rotting cow’s head to then die after hitting the electrocuting light above. It’s an imposing artwork, towards the end of the exhibition and enter the room it’s impossible to avoid both the sound first of flies being continually zapped and killed and later the scent coming from it.
Francis Bacon (supposedly) stopped, stood and watched Hirst’s A Thousand Years piece for an hour and the similarity between the two great artists is apparent; both of their works focus on death. It also makes sense that Bacon, or anyone, could watch such a grim thing for such a long time; people are infatuated with gore and even though you don’t want to watch, you can’t help but. It’s like when people drive past a car crash, you don’t want to look but you do.
But it was another vitrine-esque piece on show called Avoid Me (1991) which moved me the most. Not because of what was inside but more what wasn’t. This piece is two boxes, each split into six parts with each part having a space for a human appendage, two leg parts, two arm parts, a head part and a central torso part. One box standing, the other laying, they appear to me as either a boxy human case/prison or a transparent, minimalist coffin. You can’t help but look at them without imagining a human form either trapped or stored inside. They allude to torture and/or death through their space; the box laying down more so shows how art can make you think of empty space in this way.
“The idea for these boxes came from a dream, I dreamt of being locked in a space like this…I remember thinking about Van Gogh’s painting of a chair with his pipe on his and people say its a self-portrait and you’re thinking how can it be a self-portrait when there’s no figure in it, it’s just a chair. But then it’s not really about the presence it’s about the absence of the person, and I was thinking about that at the time and that’s what these works are really about.”
Damien Hirst about Avoid Me.
Spot Paintings
If (cutting and) putting “things” in glass boxes is what Hirst is most famous for, painting coloured spots on white canvases is probably the second thing he is most famous for. With over 1000 in existence and ranging in size from 40 feet/12m to 10 inches/25cm they mostly follow a similar naming system of chemicals, apparently taken arbitrarily from the chemical company Sigma-Aldrich’s catalogue Biochemicals for Research and Diagnostic Reagents, a book Hirst stumbled across in the early 1990s.
Because there are so many of these spot paintings, I’ve seen some of them before at other exhibitions or museum permanent collections but due to the simplicity of them; I can’t remember which ones they were. There is little deviation between them but that’s not to say they’re all the same. As I mentioned, they come in numerous sizes but also canvas shape, the orientation of spots in grids, the saturation of the spot colours, variation of spot size, irregularity of the composition, canvas colour and more variables.
At this exhibition, however, there are five examples (four if you count one as a double canvas) including the aforementioned 40-footer called Iodomethane-13c (1999) containing 14,400 spots (yes, I counted them) which I found quite impressive. The power of something so simple to be so visually stimulating; I’m sure my taste of finding satisfaction in perfect grids and perfect circles is the main factor here. But they do have a scientific quality to them, even without the chemical names I would still associate them with this. The use of bright coloured circles on a stark white background instantly makes me think of chemical compound illustrations and diagrams from science textbooks.
They also have a sense of “mechanicalism” to them through their perfection, as if painted by a machine or robot. It’s been well documented that Hirst does not paint these spot paintings himself but rather his assistants and when asked about this he “every single spot painting contains my eye, my hand, and my heart” which is a nice way to think about it. But he also said “I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it”, so you can choose yourself how you feel about Hirst not making these himself. As other artists before him have done such as Koons and Andy Warhol, he sees the idea and conception as the art and not the execution and as the originator of the idea, he is, therefore, the artist in this sense.
Cabinets
As I mentioned earlier, putting “things” in boxes is kind of Hirst’s thing, but he also has several series of works where “things” are presented in glass cabinets; neatly organised, arranged and based around a theme. Numerous examples are on show in this exhibition including cabinets with medical instruments, bottles of liquid, pills, cigarettes and more.
The most prominent is a series of cabinets containing medicine packaging and containers and I’ve been a fan of these for a while now; I would go as far as to say it’s my highlight of the whole exhibition. As a graphic designer I can appreciate them from an aesthetic stance looking at pharmaceutical packaging design which is often functional, formulaic and minimal; usually consisting of only colour and typography. Also, as someone who enjoys order and organising I enjoy them for this; seeing them all perfectly lined up and often matching pops of colours together. And, of course, on a conceptual level, I think they are great. They’re Pop Art with their consumer-focused packaging design and (much like other Hirst artworks) they have the Marcel Duchamp/Readymade aspect; the ability to present a “thing” as art.
These five cabinets on show: Bodies, No Feelings, New York and Boredom/Nowhere (diptych) (1989) are part of a larger series which Hirst submitted as his thesis at Goldsmiths in 1989 with each cabinet named after a Sex Pistol’s song. The contents of each cabinet however are not related to the song titles, although it’s easy to make that connection with names like Bodies, Problems or No Feelings.
It’s also interesting that despite being named after Sex Pistols songs — songs which are inherently loud, chaotic and disordered — they have this sense of neatness and order; it’s a great juxtaposition and perhaps it’s what makes the series work so well.
“It took me a long time to realise that with medicine cabinets I could just go into the pharmacy and take it out of the pharmacy and put it straight on the wall and so I thought that as an artist you had to do something, but I realised you don’t.”
Damien Hirst on his medicine cabinets series.
In the same room is this other cabinet filled with another medicinal collection of things: instruments. Titled Naked (1994), it is one of Hirst’s first instrument cabinets which follows a similar system to the medicine cabinets but now filled with stainless steel scalpels; forceps; tweezers; scissors; retractors and various gynaecological instruments. Naked puts these instruments on display and allows the viewer to see them in their pristine and sterile glory. Usually, these kinds of tools are only seen by doctors and surgeons and often not by the person whom they’re being used on.
This work has the same feeling to me as his Avoid Me piece, where you can’t help but imagine how these tools are used and place yourself in that narrative and situation. That’s how it feels for me at least.
“My interest in medicine and these kinds of instruments is that they’re kind of hope and fear mixed within then because you kind of look at them and they give you hope because if you need an operation or a tumour removed to live, you have to go to the hospital and you have to have it cut out and that gives you more life for hope. But within that, from cutting you open there’s the risk that you might die or not recover or not come out from the anaesthetic so the whole thing of life and death is within these instruments and I love them for that reason.”
Damien hirst about Naked.
Much of Hirst’s artwork has since become synonymous with British 1990s culture aka Britpop, a name that came about when the world’s media was focussing on the success of the YBA artists in the art world and with Britpop bands like Oasis, Suede, Pulp and Blur. The name of the exhibition itself surely alludes to the 1994 song of the same name by Blur. But it could also because all of the artworks on show were made during this time, at the end of the twentieth century.
Is this exhibition also a love letter to this period for Hirst? Most of his artworks from the 21st century don’t compare, other than his For the Love of God (2007) (aka the diamond skull made with over 8600 flawless diamonds costing 14 million to produce)in 2007, as they simply don’t have a shock factor like his earlier works. I’m not necessarily a fan of morbid, macabre or dark work (films or music either) but I can recognise and understand the power that these kinds of artworks, especially the ones on show at End of a Century, can have over people.
For this post, I only chose a small number of pieces but there is way more to check out at the exhibition. End of a Century is on until 12 June 2021, admission is free and advance booking is required and well worth the visit in my opinion. If you can’t check it out in person; there is also a 3D experience on the gallery website along with images of the exhibition.
Read more blog posts on craig-berry.co.uk or my Medium page.
