Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirstis an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists, who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth valued at £215m in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth7 June 1965
In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.
Artists are like everybody else.
As a father, I would say I am more like a mother. I do a lot of hugging.
But whenever I look at the question of how to live, the answer's always staring me in the face. I'm already doing it.
For me, art is always a kind of theater.
I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.
I'm 43. I'm not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet.
It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.
Sometimes when you're drunk you can see better.
When we are no longer children, we are already dead.
I just do what everybody asks me to do, in terms of media and stuff.
Because it's visual art, a lot of it comes from childhood experience but then a lot comes from the visual language - in advertising and stuff like that - which is around us.
What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect.
The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.