达明安‧赫斯特

达明安‧赫斯特1965年生于布里斯托,在英格兰北部列斯成长。1986至89年间先后就读该市之雅各布‧克来玛艺术学院和伦敦金匠学院。现于德文郡及伦敦生活和工作。1988年在学期间,策划了经典艺术展览「凝」。1995年荣获伦敦泰特美术馆「特纳奖」。

1980年代末90年代初年轻艺术家们组织并策划了一系列展览,而「凝」是当中最早期的展览之一。这个展览在伦敦东区废弃的工厦里举行,其展区面积与博物馆相若。这系列展览,标示着英国艺术风貌的改变。往后十年,不少参展艺术家也声名远播,而赫斯特则成为他那一辈中最著名的艺术家,可谓家传户晓。

赫斯特的作品素材广泛,形式多样,所涉猎的题材有爱、欲望、生命和死亡等重大课题。单就标题也可见一斑,比如他最著名作品《生者对死者无动于衷》(1991),当中一条十二呎长的虎鲨被浸泡在一缸甲醛里。同年,其个人展览「爱与不爱」在伦敦西区一间废置的商店里,分上下层两个房间展出。下层房间展示了蝴蝶标本被崁入漆上光面单色油彩的画布上;而上层则展示着各种异国的蝴蝶,牠们整个生命周期,由孵化到觅食、成长、繁殖以至死亡都一一陈列,展览还有其他装置作品,诸如展于柜内的医药制品、瓶子、鱼箱,及浸泡在甲醛里的动物残躯、贝壳和烟蒂等。

除了雕塑,赫斯特亦尝试绘画及版画的创作。他的《旋转》系列,利用了机器产生离心力,把颜料分散洒落在画布上,原理和他的蚀刻版画集《在旋涡中》一样。此外,与医学和药物有关的素材都常在他的作品中出现。他的第一部主要版画作品《最后的晚餐》 (1999),十三幅网印版画就是以药品包装设计为依据。赫斯特选择这些药盒纯粹因为它的外观而并非药物的成份,每个药盒上的药物名称均被日常英国餐厅食物名称所代替。

在1992年第三届国际伊斯坦堡双年展中,赫斯特展出相当多作品。1993年第四十五届威尼斯双年展,赫斯特在阿柏度展区展览了《母子分离》,当中母牛与小牛被切开成两半,分别泡在四缸甲醛里。另外,赫斯特亦曾参与多个重要联展,当中包括:「二十世纪英国雕塑」展(国立网球场美术馆,巴黎,1996);「感觉:萨奇英国青年艺术家藏品」展(皇家美术学院,伦敦,1997);「单数形式(有时重复) 」(古根汉博物馆,纽约,2004)。近期举行的个展计有:「一个时代的终结」(高古轩画廊,纽约);「黑暗树木」(伊拉里奥.格尔亚拉画廊,莱比锡和墨西哥城,2010);「无所谓」(白立方画廊,伦敦,2009);「为了上帝的爱」(国立博物馆,阿姆斯特丹,2008)。2004年,赫斯特在拿波里考古博物馆举行了首个个人回顾展「极苦与狂喜:1989-2004作品选辑」。

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965, and grew up in Leeds in the north of England. He studied at Jacob Kramer College of Art in Leeds and later Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1986-9. Hirst lives and works in Devon and London. He curated the now legendary exhibition Freeze in 1988 whilst still a student and in 1995 he was awarded the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery, London.

Freeze was the first of a group of exhibitions organised and curated by young artists in the late 1980s and early 1990s which presented work in museum sized spaces of disused industrial buildings in the East End of London. These exhibitions signalled a change in the artistic landscape of Britain and many of the exhibited artists went on to establish international reputations in the subsequent decade, while Hirst was to become the most famous artist of his generation and a household name.

Hirst works with a wide array of materials and across numerous art forms. He tackles big subjects of love, desire, life and death, and his titles say as much, as in his most renowned work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), which features a 12-foot tiger shark floating in a glass tank of formaldehyde. His solo exhibition of the same year, In and Out of Love, took place in two rooms, one above the other, in a disused shop in the West End of London. In the lower space, dead butterflies were embedded in the glossy paint of monochrome canvases, while upstairs the complete life cycle of exotic butterflies was acted out as they hatched from pupae, fed, bred and eventually died. Other installation works from this time include wall cabinets displaying such items as pharmaceutical products, bottles and tanks of fish and sections of animals in formaldehyde, shells, and cigarette ends.

In parallel to his sculptural work, Hirst has continued to experiment with works in two dimensions, producing a vast number of paintings and prints. For his Spin series, paintings are made with a machine that centrifugally disperses the paint that is steadily poured onto a shaped canvas surface. This is the same principle we see in his In a Spin portfolio of etchings. Medical and pharmaceutical references feature prominently in his work. For his first major body of prints, The Last Supper (1999), Hirst based the thirteen screenprints on the designs of specific pharmaceutical packets which were chosen for how they looked rather than the properties of the drug. In each, the original drug name is replaced by everyday British café food.

A substantial showing of his work was included in the Third International Istanbul Biennial in 1992. He was selected for the Aperto Section of the 54th Venice Biennale in 1993, where he showed Mother and Child Divided, a work consisting of a cow and calf split in two and displayed in four vitrines of formaldehyde. Hirst’s work has been shown in many important group shows including Twentieth Century British Sculpture at the Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Paris in 1996; Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1997; and Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions include End of An Era, Gagosian Gallery, New York; Dark Trees, Galería Hilario Galguera, Leipzig and Mexico City, 2010; Nothing Matters, White Cube, London, 2009; and For the Love of God, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2008. In 2004, Hirst had his first solo retrospective The Agony and The Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989-2004, at the Archaeological Museum, Naples.