Search results for ""Author Damien Hirst""

This exquisite hardback volume, boasting a ribbed leather spine, presents the second collection of a series of drawings on paper by Damien Hirst (born 1965), rendered in a range of mediums including silverpoint, charcoal and ink. The drawings form part of Hirst's most ambitious project to date, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, presented at the Pinault collection's two Venetian museums—the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana—from April to December 2017. The exhibition marked the first time in the Collection's history that both museums had been dedicated to the work of a single artist.

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Simplified renderings of the iconic British artist's works: a coloring book for all ages Damien Hirst: Colouring Book features the British artist’s most iconic works rendered as simple line drawings. Coloring fans of all ages can immerse themselves in themes and motifs found within some of the artist’s most enduring series, including anatomical models, butterflies, medicine cabinets, spin paintings, color charts and kaleidoscope paintings. Featuring Hirst’s most popular images, including "The Incomplete Truth," "Myth," "Loving in a World of Desire," "Hymn," "For the Love of God," "Benevolence" and more, the volume brings some of the most controversial and groundbreaking work of contemporary art to a witty coloring-book format.

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Based on the minimal aesthetic of the medicinal pill, the Schizophrenogenesis series by Damien Hirst (born 1965) examines our almost spiritual faith in the rigors of science and the pharmaceutical industry. This volume includes all of the works from the series, including The Cure: 30 silkscreen prints, each depicting a two-color pill set against a vibrantly hued background. Also included in this volume are the corresponding sculptural works, reproductions of medicine bottles, pharmaceutical boxes, ampoules and syringes at various monstrous scales. These works continue Hirst’s exploration of contemporary belief systems, which now rank medicine alongside religion, love and art. Hirst explains: “Pills are a brilliant little form, better than any Minimalist art. They’re all designed to make you buy them … they come out of flowers, plants, things from the ground, and they make you feel good, you know, to just have a pill, to feel beauty.”

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This publication accompanies the Damien Hirst 'Two Weeks One Summer' exhibition at White Cube Gallery, May 2012. Painting has always been an important part of Hirst's oeuvre, but unlike the spot paintings and photorealist series which were made using a collaborative studio process, this body of work is altogether more personal: painted from life, by Hirst in his Devon studio.The paintings, often intimate in size, could be seen as traditional still lifes, depicting an array of carefully arranged elements, both natural and inanimate, sometimes memento mori, alongside objects and formal devices that have made their appearance in Hirst's sculptures and installations before. Exquisitely coloured birds on display stands or in simple glass boxes, butterflies, fruit and cherry blossom at the peak of its beauty, intimate the pure joy of spring's transition into summer but also the temporal significance of this natural phenomenon.Next to these bucolic objects, more sinister symbols take their place: oversized scissors, a shark's gaping jawbone, bell jars and even several lonely single or conjoined foetuses floating in jars, elements that are displaced from the laboratory table rather than the domestic one. Some objects are painted with clarity and impasto; others appear hazy and faint, as if they are somehow more insubstantial, part of a sudden apparition or dream-like vision.

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For Heaven's Sake was produced for the Damien Hirst: Forgotten Promises inaugural exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong in 2011. The book title, named after the artwork "For Heaven's Sake" (2008), includes full-color plates of the skull, including fabrication shots and installation shots at the Hong Kong exhibition where this life-size human baby skull cast in platinum and covered in 8,128 pavé-set perfect diamonds: 7,105 natural fancy pink diamonds and 1,023 white diamonds on the fontanel was shown for the first time. Also included are 8 unique preliminary drawings by the artist. This spectacular memento mori was cast from an original skull that formed part of a nineteenth-century pathology collection that Hirst acquired some years ago. As Hirst says: "Diamonds are about perfection and clarity and wealth and sex and death and immortality. They are a symbol of everything that's eternal, but then they have a dark side as well." The book includes a short text by curator, writer and critic, Francesco Bonami published in both Chinese and English. Bonami is the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He is also the artistic director of the Fondazione Sandretto ReRebaudengo per l'Arte in Turin, Fondazione Pitti Discovery in Florence and the Centro di Arte Contemporanea Villa Manin. He was the director of the 50th Biennale di Venezia of Visual Arts in 2003.

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Published on the occasion of Damien Hirst's exhibition at White Cube in Hong Kong in the spring of 2013. Among many new works illustrated in the publication are pieces from some of Hirst's latest series: the Entomology paintings and the Blade paintings. Hirst began work on the Entomology paintings in 2009. Each piece is made by placing hundreds of varieties of insect and beetle species into household gloss paint, in intricate geometric patterns. The series is reminiscent of Hirst's iconic series of butterfly wing Kaleidoscope pieces, dating from 2001, which were originally inspired by Victorian tea trays. As with the butterfly--one of Hirst's most enduring "universal triggers"--the insects' appeal derives largely from the appearance of life they retain in death. However, whilst the iridescent beauty of the wings in the Kaleidoscope series evoke stained glass windows, and are often assigned spiritual titles, the Entomology paintings are named after phases and characters in Dante Alighieri's tortuous vision of the afterlife, The Divine Comedy. The works also allude to Hirst's longterm interest in the nineteenth-century fascination with natural history and the irony involved in having to kill something in order to look at it. The Blade paintings are amongst the newest series of works in Hirst's practice. Thousands of variously shaped scalpel blades are positioned on a canvas in spectacular, mandala-like patterns. In some of the works, intermittent areas of coloured gloss paint have been layered in between the blades. The Blade paintings reference two of Hirst's seminal earlier series. While their geometric patterns recall the earlier series of butterfly Kaleidoscope paintings, in their use of surgical instruments, Hirst also returns to one of his most recognisable themes: medicine, and its inevitable futility in the face of our mortality. The surgical materials, first used by Hirst in his early 90s instrument cabinets, are described by the artist as "phenomenal objects because they have to have this confidence and this belief. They are the best quality. They are brilliantly designed, for all the right reasons." With the Blade paintings, the instruments eventual inability to arrest decay is highlighted by their relegation to decorative status.

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Requiem II details all the previously unseen skull paintings from the Requiem exhibition at the Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev, Ukraine, in April 2009. Featuring over 40 works painted between 2006 and 2008, Hirst uses paint to convey the darker, philosophical attributes of death. Emerging from the midnight darkness, his Requiem skull paintings speak of a remembrance of corporeality and the transportation from body into soul. Using the skull as representative of this transition, Hirst appeals to our universal nature, his art merging sublime romanticism with life's cold scientific reality: together we drive towards death.

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Hirst began his collection in the late 1980s by exchanging his own works with those of his contemporaries and artist friends. It has grown to include works by many international artists of earlier generations: not only postwar masters like Bacon and Giacometti, but also pivotal figures in the history of twentieth-century art, such as Richard Hamilton, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Richard Prince and Kurt Schwitters. Two themes recur frequently in this selection--memento mori and the animal kingdom--and together they are capable of communicating the spirit of the entire collection, combining masterpieces of contemporary art with fascinating specimens from the natural world. An independent curator, author and art advisor, Geuna has contributed a perceptive essay on the scope and nature of this collection as well as a penetrating interview with Damien Hirst. Another essay by Mario Codognato (writer, and curator at Blain|Southern) explores Hirst's dual role as artist/collector, and analyses his considerable influence, both on his contemporaries and on younger artists whose work is still developing. Accompanying stunning colour plates of all the works in the exhibition, there are also brief biographies of the artists involved.

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This catalogue was produced to accompany Damien Hirst's 2003 exhibition at White Cube gallery, London. The show dissected and recast the story of Jesus and his disciples through paintings and sculptural work while revealing the uncertainty at the heart of human experience. The exhibited works included The Apostles,a series of 13 clinical steel and glass cabinets filled with medical instruments, weapons, ornaments, blood, and life's detrius: a dozen canvases encrusted with flies suspended in resin, each given a fatal disease for a title: skinned cows'/bulls' heads in individual tanks punctured/lacerated/stabbed with knives and glass fragments; and huge canvases embedded with butterfly wings arranged in extraordinary grid systems. This book contains 46 colour illustrations, including many details of the exhibited works and four gatefolds. An introductory essay by Annushka Shani examines each work more closely, drawing out the themes of love, life and death explored by Hirst through this exhibition.

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The alphabet, fantastically illustrated by the philosophical work of Damien Hirst From A is for Anatomy to Z is for Zebra, discover British artist Damien Hirst's painting, sculpture, and much more on every page of this fantastically illustrated alphabet book. Hirst's body of work addresses the scientific, philosophical and religious issues which lie at the heart of human existence.

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Published on the occasion of Damien Hirst's exhibition at the Wallace Collection, London in October 2009, this catalogue prints a selection of blue skull and flower paintings from the show, with a total of 30 illustrations and 3 gatefolds.

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Requiem I catalogues each of Hirst's works exhibited at the Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev, Ukraine, in April 2009: over 90 in total. Featuring iconic early pieces from the 1990s through to the new, previously unseen skull paintings, the book is testament to the vast range of Hirst's output. Michael Bracewell's extensive essay examines the conceptual and technical developments in the artist's career within the wider context of his cultural influence.

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'The Currency' is a collection of 10,000 NFTs which correspond with 10,000 original artworks by Damien Hirst. Art collectors were given the choice to either keep the NFT or exchange it for the physical artwork. At the close of the exchange period in July 2022, 5,149 collectors decided to keep the physical artworks, and 4,851 the NFT. The physical artworks linked to the retained NFTs and reproductions of the destroyed NFTs were displayed in Perspex screens suspended in the gallery space. The physical artworks were then publicly burned in furnaces at the exhibition. Published in association with Newport Street Gallery with an exclusive release on the occasion of the Hirst’s exhibition to conclude the series, The Currency book features 332 of the 10,000 artworks as well as installation shots of the final exhibition, prefaced by an interview between Hirst and British actor, writer and broadcaster Stephen Fry.

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This hardback catalogue illustrates the complete paintings featured in Damien Hirst's Gagosian Gallery, New York exhibition, The Elusive Truth, in 2005. Extended captions written by the artist accompany many of the paintings. The book features 22 diecuts and 31 tipped-in plates.

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This comprehensive monograph was produced to accompany the drawings retrospective Damien Hirst: Corpus: Drawings 1981-2006, held at Gagosian Gallery, New York in 2006. It features more than 200 drawings that offer a historical insight into rarely seen aspects of the artist's work and process. Included are early drawings from Hirst's student days; pencil sketches for seminal sculptures such as "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," "A Thousand Years," "'The Acquired Inability to Escape," "Away from the Flock" and "The Hat Makes the Man"; preparatory diagrams for early spot paintings and medicine cabinets; a large-scale series of 14 drawings for The Stations of the Cross (2004); and proposals for unrealised and future projects. Accompanying the drawings is a conversation between the artist and political philosopher John Gray (author of Straw Dogs, False Dawn and Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern), and an essay by British historian Simon Baker.

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On the early work of Britain’s most successful living artist, from his formative years at Goldsmiths to his pioneering conceptual pieces among the Young British Artists The stellar ascent of Damien Hirst (born 1965) began with his enrollment at Goldsmiths College in 1986, where he quickly became one of the standout artists of his class. This retrospective focuses on the early years of Hirst’s trailblazing career, featuring his university work, his first Spot Painting and his experiments with collage. Additionally, this volume highlights his most iconic projects, such as the staggering 1999 painted bronze sculpture Hymn and his now-infamous series of conceptual works in which taxidermied animals are suspended in vitrines of formaldehyde. A selection of quotes accompanies the illustrations and reveals the themes which have remained constant throughout the artist’s career: beauty, religion, science, life and death.

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Requiem II details all the previously unseen skull paintings from the Requiem exhibition at the Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev, Ukraine, in April 2009. Featuring over 40 works painted between 2006 and 2008, Hirst uses paint to convey the darker, philosophical attributes of death. Emerging from the midnight darkness, his Requiem skull paintings speak of a remembrance of corporeality and the transportation from body into soul. Using the skull as representative of this transition, Hirst appeals to our universal nature, his art merging sublime romanticism with life's cold scientific reality: together we drive towards death.

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This book highlights the connection between Damien Hirst (born 1965) and the British modernist artist Margaret Mellis (1914–2009), who became a close friend and mentor to the YBA protagonist during the development of his early career. In the 1980s Hirst made regular visits to Mellis' home and studio in Southwold, on the North Sea coast of England, where he spent much time studying her beautiful drawings of "half-dead flowers" on envelopes and driftwood assemblages fashioned from her beachcombing forays. In 2001 Hirst expressed the view that she had been unjustly neglected and deserved to be "up there—large on the map with her contemporaries"; their works were first exhibited side by side at the Tate in 2008. Alongside reproductions of assemblages and drawings by Mellis and Hirst, this volume includes a reproduction of a letter written to Hirst by Mellis from c. 1987, and an essay on Mellis by Hirst.

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Relics constitutes the new and largestever retrospective of Damien Hirst's work, including both iconic, and previously unseen artworks, spanning 27 years of the artistscareer. If you own one book on the work of this artist, this is the latest and most comprehensive. For the first time Hirst's two diamond skulls, "For the Love of God" (2007) and "For Heaven's Sake" (2008), are pictured together. Explaining, "art's about life and it can't really be about anything else … there isn't anything else," Hirst's work investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, anddissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience.

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition Dark Trees, at Hilario Galguera, April 2010, this catalogue features a number of previously unseen Blue Paintings from Hirst's 2006-2008 series. Marking his second ever show in Mexico, his oil painted skulls find symmetry in Mexico's Day of the Dead'celebrations, from which the artist has drawn a great many influences. Included in the publication are "Human Skull in Space," "Man Barely Alive" and a number of gate-folded triptychs: "Three Views of a Skull," "Towards The End of The Day" and "Bad Omen."

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This exquisite limited-edition book with leather-ribbed spine presents a series of drawings on vellum and paper, rendered in a range of mediums including silverpoint, ink, lapis lazuli pigment and gold leaf. Complete with scrawled annotations and collection stamps, the Renaissance-style drawings depict each of the 100 artworks that constitute Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, the subject of an exhibition at the Pinault Collection’s two Venetian museums—Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana—until December 2017. The book features a text by Amie Corry.

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The premise of this book couldn’t be simpler: 130 photographs of Damien Hirst taken by David Bailey during a single shoot lasting eight minutes. Each pose is spontaneous and determined not by Bailey but by Hirst, who mocks the camera with his tongue poked out, mouth open wide and hands pulling at his cheeks. These photos are humble and unrehearsed, and so continue the sprit of Bailey’s Democracy in which Bailey photographed a cross-section of naked subjects, shunning issues of composition, lighting and digital manipulation. Renouncing text and even a title page, 8 Minutes resists formulaic over-designed coffee-table publications. Bailey’s roguish message: what you see is what you get. David Bailey, born in London in 1938, is one of the most successful photographers of his generation. By the 1960s his work, especially for Vogue, had already made him a cult figure. His numerous books include Trouble and Strife, Nudes, If We Shadows, The Lady Is a Tramp and David Bailey’s Rock ’n’ Roll Heroes. Steidl has published Birth of the Cool, Chasing Rainbows, Locations, Bailey’s Democracy, Havana, NY JS DB 62, Pictures That Mark Can Do and Is That So Kid.

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A revealing collection of quotations from world-renowned artist Damien HirstHirst-isms is a collection of quotations—bold, surprising, often humorous, and always insightful—from celebrated artist Damien Hirst, whose controversial work explores the connections between art, religion, science, life, and death. Emerging in the 1990s as a leading member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Hirst first became famous and gained a reputation as a provocateur with a series of artworks featuring dead and sometimes dissected animals (including a shark, sheep, and cow) preserved in glass tanks filled with formaldehyde.Gathered from interviews and other primary sources and organized by subject, these quotations explore Hirst’s early years, family life, and the beginnings of his fascination with art; the major themes of his work; his influences and heroes; his motivation; his process and the boundary-pushing production of his work; and his thoughts on the art world, fame, and money. The result is a comprehensive and nuanced book that sheds new light on a fascinating and important contemporary artist.Select quotations from the book: “The less I feel like an artist, the better I feel.” “I like it when people love my art. I like it when people hate my art. I just don’t want them to ignore my art.” “Painting’s like the most fabulous illusion, because there’s nothing at stake. Except yourself.” “I’m interested in the confusion between art and life, I like it when the world gets in the way.” “Sometimes you have to step over the edge to know where it is.”

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Damien Hirst enters into creative conversation with the many masterpieces of the Galleria Borghese In an extraordinary cultural undertaking, British artist Damien Hirst (born 1965) has launched an intense and unfiltered interaction with the works of Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian, Bernini, Canova and others in Italy’s Galleria Borghese. An unparalleled and controversial celebrity of the contemporary art world, Hirst’s work is perfectly suited to be displayed in relation to the colors and materials found in the Galleria Borghese. His sculptures, made of fine materials such as bronze, Carrara marble or seductive malachite, have been put on display in rooms of the museum that house masterpieces of the modern era such as the statuary groups of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Antonio Canova’s Paolina Borghese. The resulting effect is one of surprising harmony: the Five Grecian Nudes appear natural next to Canova’s sculpture and the primitive appearance of the Lion Women of Asit Mayor is in perfect chromatic accord with the floors of the Galleria. Hirst’s new series of Colour Space paintings offers the same sense of continuity as the flow of the works hanging in the museum’s picture gallery. This comprehensive vision of the past and the present is fostered by the proximity of antique painting and contemporary painting, without frames to separate them, and without elements of signage to interrupt this immersion.

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Charles Darwin's seminal formulation of the theory of Evolution, On the Origin of Species continues to be as controversial today as when it was first published. This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction and notes by William Bynum, and features a cover designed by Damien Hirst.Written for a general readership, On the Origin of Species sold out on the day of its publication and has remained in print ever since. Instantly and persistently controversial, the concept of natural selection transformed scientific analysis about all life on Earth. Before the Origin of Species, accepted thinking held that life was the static and perfect creation of God. By a single, systematic argument Darwin called this view into question. His ideas have affected public perception of everything from religion to economics.William Bynum's introduction discusses Darwin's life, the publication and reception of the themes of On the Origin of Species, and the subsequent development of its major themes. The new edition also includes brief biographies of some of the most important scientific thinkers leading up to and surrounding the Origin of Species, suggested further reading, notes and a chronology. Charles Darwin (1809-82), a Victorian scientist and naturalist, has become one of the most famous figures of science to date. The advent of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859 challenged and contradicted all contemporary biological and religious beliefs.If you enjoyed On the Origin of Species, you might like Darwin's The Descent of Man, also available in Penguin Classics.

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The Visual Candy paintings were made between 1992 and 1994.The works showcase the ways in which Damien Hirst used the signifier of candy during the early 1990's, exploring questions of pure aesthetics. Hirst says they were created as a direct riposte to an art critic who had dismissed Hirst's Spot Paintings as "just visual candy.' Addressing the viewer on a deliberately emotionaland instinctive level, these works, abetted by their exuberant titles, among them Some Fun (1993) and Dippy Dappy Dabby (1993), set out to question the implication that aesthetically pleasing art is inherently insignificant.While ostensibly abstract, the paintings in fact depict medicinal pills, and can be seen as a stylised depiction of the psychological effects of happy, mood-enhancing drugs. Hirst once described how, "in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease… the colours project so much joy it's hard to feel it, but it's there. The horror underlying everything," In this context, the Visual Candy paintings, despite their surface optimism, posses a disquieting undercurrent of tension and darkness - born from an awareness of the inevitable low that follows any high. Hirst once said that "art is about life - there isn't anything else.'

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"Breakfast at The Wolseley gave Damien and I the perfect opportunity to discuss the business of the day," remembers Frank Dunphy, Damien Hirst's business manager, "the bow-tied super-ego to Mr. Hirst's id," as The Wall Street Journal has described him. "Always on time, Damien would first hold out his hand for a pen or pencil and would then begin sketching on the back of his placemat." Portraits of Frankis published to coincide with Dunphy's retirement after almost 15 years with the artist. Seen here for the first time, Hirst's portraits were sketched during the pair's regular breakfast meetings at the famous Wolseley restaurant in London between 2004 and 2010. They provide a touching illustration of Frank and Damien's collaborative relationship as it unfolded over the course of some of the most extraordinary years of the artist's career.

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Martin Eder's new body of work is inhabited by ghostly hybrid creatures. Blurring the transition between humans, animals, and supernatural beings, Eder explores the motif of the boundary and its transgression in his oil paintings. His subjects allude to an encounter with the underworld and recall Dante's Inferno. A symbolism that both reflects a (post-)pandemic unease and hints at the encounter of reality and illusion. Eerie and fascinating at the same time, the paintings outline a space marked by the collapse of a shared perception. In addition to studio insights and paintings, the volume includes an elucidating text by art historian Thomas Elsen as well as a conversation between Eder, Damien Hirst and Tim Marlow, director of London's Design Museum.

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In 2014, Damien Hirst (born 1965) unveiled a new series of "paintings" composed of vast numbers of surgical instruments, which combine to form bird's-eye views of cities from around the world. With these Black Scalpel Cityscapes, Hirst investigates subjects pertaining to the sometimes disquieting realities of modern life--surveillance, urbanization, globalization and the virtual nature of conflict--as well as those relating to the human condition in general, such as our inability to arrest physical decay. Buildings, rivers and roads are rendered as scalpels, razor blades, hooks and safety pins. Described by the artist as "portraits of living cities," the full series is illustrated in this volume and accompanied by detail illustrations. Also included is an essay by Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps, and a short story by novelist and arts writer Michael Bracewell.

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Hirst’s Psalm paintings allude to Gothic stained glass windows and the circular patterns of Buddhist mandalas This beautifully illustrated book constitutes a comprehensive survey of Damien Hirst's Psalm paintings. The 150 works in the series are made up of iridescent butterfly wings and paint on canvas, which combine to form kaleidoscopic patterns reminiscent of Gothic stained glass windows. Dating from 2008, the paintings address some of Hirst's most enduring and important themes: beauty, art, belief, life and death. Each of the fully illustrated paintings is accompanied by the Old Testament prayer from which its title is derived, the text rendered on images of individually selected marble samples. Also included is a complete list of works, and essays by art writers Michael Bracewell and Amie Corry. In his essay, Bracewell writes: "The Psalm paintings can't help but bring together, in literal form, such fundamental concepts as beauty, and power over death through prayer and belief, while simultaneously seeming to propose solely their own—albeit spectacular—abstraction. As they take their place within the greater canon of Hirst's art, these paintings extend his fascination with natural history and the potentially synonymous relationships between life, death, art and 'beauty,' and the language of Christian faith and religion." The Complete Psalm Paintings is an exquisite companion to one of Hirst's most beautiful series.Damien Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965. He first came to public attention in 1988 when he conceived and curated Freeze, an exhibition of his own work and that of his contemporaries staged in an abandoned London warehouse. Since then Hirst has become widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation. Alongside over 80 solo exhibitions, he has worked on numerous curatorial projects. In 2008, Hirst took the unprecedented step of bypassing gallery involvement by selling 244 new works at a Sotheby's, London auction. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995 and received a major solo retrospective at Tate Modern, London. He lives in Devon, England.

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Idolatry, illusion, glitz and greed in Damien Hirst’s seminal sculpture and painting cycles In 2010, Gagosian Gallery staged a seminal exhibition of Damien Hirst’s (born 1965) paintings and sculptures. Titled End of an Era, it addressed concepts of illusion and reality, myth and idolatry, and took its name from the central sculpture in the exhibition: a severed bull’s head in a gold vitrine. The work served as a sequel to Hirst’s 2008 sculpture The Golden Calf, a formaldehyde-preserved bull. Alongside this sculpture, the exhibition showed Hirst’s Diamond Fact Paintings for the first time—a series of photorealist depictions of the world’s most illustrious jewels—as well as two Diamond Cabinets. This catalog collects these pieces and includes a catalogue raisonné of each series (Gold Tanks, Diamond Cabinets and Diamond Fact Paintings). The publication also features a conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hirst.

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With full-color plates of paintings and sculptures, this title was produced for the inaugural exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong, Damien Hirst: Forgotten Promises. It includes "For Heaven's Sake" (2008), a life-size human baby skull cast in platinum and covered in 8,128 pink and white diamonds, as well as beautiful diamond cabinets in gold and silver. A group of paintings from 2008 to 2009, including "Age of Magnificence" and "Fading Magnificence," show real butterflies entombed in layers of shiny metallic paint. The new Love Paintings are painted in oil with painstaking attention to realistic detail. "Why else would you do it, when you could just get a photograph that looks identical?" Hirst has said. "But it's not the same thing, is it? A photograph is from a moment, a split second. Painting is about stopping to look at the world, considering it, and giving it more and more importance."

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