Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965. He is known for his works that give a sense of life amid death, including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living (1991), in which a shark was preserved in formalin in a huge tank. In 1986, he entered the School of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London. While still a student, he organized a self-organized exhibition called "Frieze" with his friends in a vacant building along the River Thames in 1988. In 1990, he created his first work, A Thousand Years, using animal corpses. He divided the space of the glass case with a glass panel with holes, placed a box for cultivating maggots on one side and a cow's head and an insecticide lamp on the other, expressing the cycle of life from when a maggot hatches to when it becomes a corpse.
In 1992, he exhibited The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living at the Saatchi Gallery in London. He was nominated for the Turner Prize for the first time, and attracted attention as one of the Young British Artists (YBA). He continued to create formalin-preserved works, such as Mother and Child Torn Apart (1993), which is a cross-section of the bodies of a mother and her calf, and Silence of Solitude (2006), which references the triptychs of Francis Bacon, who influenced him. He won the Turner Prize in 1995, and held his first retrospective at the Saatchi Gallery in 2003. In 1997, he incorporated his studio as Science Ltd., mass-producing and selling a series of dot paintings with pill motifs, and also succeeding in the business world, including publishing and restaurant management. In 2007, he was ranked number one in the art world by Art Review. In the same year, his work For the Love of God (2007), which features a skull, a symbol of death, and 8,601 diamonds, representing life, was sold for 12 billion yen at the time.
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In 2012, he held a major retrospective at Tate Modern (London). In 2017, his large-scale solo exhibition "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable" (Palazzo Grassi, Venice) attracted attention for its grandiose concept of displaying treasures excavated from the fictional shipwreck "Unbelievable" that sank to the bottom of the East African ocean. Recently, he has presented a series of paintings using butterflies, "Kaleidoscope Paintings" (2001-).
