“Requiem”. Damien Hirst

Art’s about invention, and we are all desperately trying to invent a better future, and to learn from our past. I see a healthy, hungry audience for art and all types of culture in the Ukraine, and that inspires me.
Damien Hirst

Requiem is not just the end but the beginning. Not just the epitome of life but hope for the future. After night comes a new dawn. A new page follows the one before. I believe that Damien Hirst continues to push and challenge boundaries with his creativity. Requiem opens a new chapter for him. We see a different Hirst  our midst.
Victor Pinchuk

The PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv, Ukraine) is pleased to announce Requiem, a major retrospective of over 100 works dating from 1990 to 2008, by Damien Hirst. Requiem opens on 25th April and continues through 20th September 2009. Since the start of his career, Hirst has pushed the boundaries of art and what it means to be an artist. Requiem bears witness to a bold new direction in his work by showing for the first time a series of skull paintings he created between 2006 and 2008. In works such as Floating Skull, 2006, The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, 2008 and Men Shall Know Nothing, 2008, Hirst returns to the solitary practice of painting and confronts, in very personal terms, the darkness that lies at the heart of human nature and experience.

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Requiem brings together many of the artist’s most celebrated works. Ranging from early iconic sculptures such as A Thousand Years, 1990 and Away from the Flock, 1994 to more recent works like the monumental butterfly triptych, Doorways to the Kingdom of Heaven, 2007 as well as Death Explained, 2007, a sculpture of a shark cut in half in formaldehyde, the exhibition shows the extraordinary breadth of Hirst’s artistic enterprise.

Eckhard Schneider

Everything we have known until now about Damien Hirst as an artist has been based upon the knowledge that, in a stroke of genius at the beginning of his career, he successfully combined seemingly irreconcilable artistic strategies and created a perfectly functioning system of production. This has meant a marriage between conceptual distance and the emotional brutality of fragments of reality, making possible a studio capable of putting the artist’s ideas into practice even down to the exact placing of the last screw, pill or butterfly. Within this system the role of the artist has always remained that of the inventor of concepts and ideas and the architect of their implementation through others, even in the most emotional of works. As a result, the potential conflict between emotional embedding and formal completion has always remained under the artist’s control, even in works that are pointedly critical. Like Goethe’s Faust, Hirst banks on the possibility of mastering both life and the means of production.

… In a discussion with the art critic David Sylvester, Francis Bacon once reflected upon the question of why artists approach the same old subjects again and again, when everything has already been said and done by the old masters. According to Bacon the reason for this was that the instincts that led the great masters to their achievements had changed from one generation to the next. All that remained to be done was to express this more clearly, precisely and brutally. Hirst, who clearly regards Bacon as one of the main points of departure for his new paintings, particularly in the triptychs, endeavours with calculated passion to carry out the imperceptible crossing of the borderline to death clearly, precisely and brutally.

Michael Bracewell

As described with such formidable clarity by the works gathered together in Requiem, the visual impact of the art of Damien Hirst is immediate and visceral. The viewer is confronted in each work by the physical representation, or its meticulously honed depiction, of those beliefs, ideas, conditions and institutions which shape the common basis of human experience. Mortality, faith, medicine, religion, wealth and aesthetics comprise the principal themes and subject matter of Hirst’s paintings, sculptures and installations. The ceaseless interplay of these fundamental concerns, and their intrinsic relationship to the individual and society, are brought to life in works of exquisite aphoristic refinement as well as graphic violence and sheer spectacle.

… As Requiem surveys Hirst’s art from the early 1990s to the present, the viewer becomes immediately aware of the biblical scale on which the artist is envisaging his work; in his lucidity no less than his tireless enquiry into the unknowable sleep with which our brief lives are surrounded, Hirst is one of the great religious artists of the modern period. For it is only within the correlation of religion to science, and the rational to the non-rational, that one finds the breadth of speculation through which Hirst relates unwavering realism to cosmic irony, bathos and splendour.

A Thousand Years, 1990. steel, glass, flies, maggots, MDF, Insect-O-Cutor, cow’s head, sugar, water

Death Denied, 2008. glass, steel, shark, acrylic and formadehyde solution

Death Explained, 2007 & Death Denied, 2008. Glass, steel, shark, acrylic and formadehyde solution

Night of the Long Knives, 2008. Glass, stainless steel and surgical equipment

Resurrection, 1998-2003. glass, paint and human skeleton

Schizophrenogenesis, 2008. Stainless steel, glass, cow’s heads and formaldehyde solution

Death Denied, 2008. glass, steel, shark, acrylic and formadehyde solution

Purgatory, 2008. Gold-plated stainless steel, glass, cigarettes and cigars

Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way, 2007. Stainless steel and glass cabinet with painted resin, plaster and cast metal pills

Beautiful Elena Orchid Painting, 2007. Household gloss on canvas. Six Lovely Month, 2008. Butteflies and household gloss on canvas

The History of Pain, 1999. MDF base, stainless steel knives, air blower and beach ball

The History of Pain, 1999. MDF base, stainless steel knives, air blower and beach ball

Nothing Matters/The Empty Chair, 2008. Oil on canvas. Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain/Silver 2007 silver

The Acquired Inability to Escape, Purified, 2008. Glass, steel, formica, MDF, office chair, ashtray, cigarettes and lighter

The Acquired Inability to Escape, Purified, 2008. Glass, steel, formica, MDF, office chair, ashtray, cigarettes and lighter

Beautiful Zeus Maia Freya Isis
Meditative Hysterical Sensory-Deprived Dream Painting, 2007

Night of the Long Knives, 2008. Glass, stainless steel and surgical equipment
HIV Aids, Drugs Combination, 2006. Oil on canvas

Beautiful Romance in the Age of Uncertainty Party Painting XI 2003. Household gloss on canvas

The Child’s Dream 2008. Foal, resin, gold-plated stainless steel, glass and formaldehyde solution

Away from the Flock 1994. Glass, steel, lamb and formaldehyde solution

Away from the Flock 1994. Glass, steel, lamb and formaldehyde solution.
Never See You Again 2008. Oil on canvas

Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain 2007. Silver

The Empty Chair 2008. Oil on canvas

Damien Hirst & Death Denied 2008.
Glass, steel, shark, acrylic and formadehyde solution

Damien Hirst with ‘Death Denied’, 2008 on the background

Damien Hirst & ‘Death explained’, 2007

Damien Hirst with ‘Death explained’, 2007 & ‘Death Denied’, 2008

Damien Hirst & Floating Skull 2006.
Oil on canvas

Damien Hirst & Floating Skull 2006.
Oil on canvas

Damien Hirst & Floating Skull 2006.
Oil on canvas

Idolisation 2007. Butterflies and household gloss on canvas

Karma 2008. Butterflies and household gloss on canvas

Two for Joy 2008. Oil on canvas

Heaven Can Wait 2008. Butterflies, cubic zirconia and household gloss on canvas

Doorways to the Kingdom of Heaven 2007. Butterflies and household gloss on canvas

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, 2008. Glass, stainless steel, fish, fish skeletons, acrylic, MDF, paint and formaldehyde solution

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow 2008 glass, stainless steel, fish, fish skeletons, acrylic, MDF, paint and formaldehyde solution

The Promise of Money, 2003. Resin, cow hair, sling, chain, hook, blood, Iraqi money and mirror

The Promise of Money, 2003. resin, cow hair, sling, chain, hook, blood, Iraqi money and mirror

Nothingness, 2008 glass, steel, MDF, aluminium and drug packaging

Nothingness, 2008 glass, steel, MDF, aluminium and drug packaging

False Idol, 2008 Calf, gold, glass, gold-plated steel and formaldehyde solution

False Idol, 2008 Calf, gold, glass, gold-plated steel and formaldehyde solution

I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, 1991 glass, compresor, rubber tubing, spray-gun and ping pong ball

Heaven Can Wait, 2008 butterflies, cubic zirconia and household gloss on canvas

These images are copyright of the artists and can only be used in con-junction with text/pre/review on the exhibition they accompany (Requiem) and only for the duration of the exhibition (or as preview release agreed) and other usage must be confirmed via Science Ltd. Photos courtesy of the PinchukArtCentre. See a full copyright information and a list of works (PDF) below.

High resolution images are available by request. E-mail for requests: press@pinchukartcentre.org