Damien Hirst, The Shark

The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone alive.

The thought in the title could be expressed like this: I am alive, so I cannot imagine what it actually means to be dead. And yet being dead is a fact in the sense that
that it manifests as a dead body – in this case, a tiger shark. In the view of the person who bathes, the tiger shark is a “killing machine”, but here we have it in a safe – dead – form and we can watch it at will.

The work was commissioned by Charles Saatchi and cost about PLN 250,000. Many believe that the title is best, outraged at the subject treatment of a shark that was killed for exposure.

It is worth looking for:

Soon Damien Hirst will be exhibiting his newest paintings “Cherry Blossoms” at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. The individual exhibition will open in spring 2021. The series, the result of two years of intensive work in his London studio, is the result of Hirst’s many years of research in the field of painting. The artist began the series The Cherry Blossoms shortly after the sculptural project “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” (2017). Referring to impressionism and pointillism, as well as to painting of nature, the cycle returns to the spontaneous joy of painting. Instead of installations, crystals and diamonds, which Hirst has recently accustomed us to, we have real painting here, with the fallibility of an artist working in his studio. Damien Hirst says: “Cherry blossoms are about beauty, about life and about death. They are extreme – there is something almost cheesy about them. It’s like Jackson Pollock twisted with love. They are decorative and taken from nature. They tell about desire and how we process the things around us and what we transform them into, but also about the crazy visual elusiveness of beauty – trees in full bloom against the clear sky. I had enormous pleasure in painting, completely losing myself in color and paint. They are flashy, sloppy and fragile, they tell about me and my break with minimalism and the idea of an imaginary mechanical painter. This is incredibly exciting for me. “

As if we could hear David Hockney. 🙂