Books by Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst The Civilisation Paintings

by James Fox, Norman Rosenthal, Damien Hirst

New paintings from British bad boy Hirst featuring urban environments and lush vegetation

Turner Prize-winning British artist Damien Hirst (born 1965) has long been known for audacious formal experiments, but in the striking catalog The Civilisation Paintings, Hirst offers Impressionist-inspired oil paintings that vividly capture the complexities of modern urban landscapes. Vibrant trees and flowers weave through the scenes, serving as poignant reminders of nature's resilience amid human development. Realistic elements are contrasted with pointillist techniques and thrown paint. Hirst also overlays the compositions with colored spots arranged in grids, recalling his spot paintings. Hirst infuses the series with deep emotion, compellingly contrasted by his use of AI tools, showcasing his ongoing fascination with science and technology. This beautifully designed catalog features 54 full-color reproductions of the complete series, both in its entirety and in its detail, and includes a foreword by art historian Norman Rosenthal and an in-depth interview with Hirst by journalist and author James Fox.

DAMIEN HIRST cherry blossoms (french edition).

by Damien Hirst

Incandescent and celebratory paintings of cherry blossoms from Damien Hirst, in a glorious oversize volume with 18 gatefold spreads
With 107 works, Cherry Blossoms marks a new chapter in Damien Hirst’s career-long exploration of the physical relationship between artist and canvas that began with his Spot Paintings in 1986. Hirst describes his cherry blossoms as “garish and messy and fragile”; the series signals a shift in Hirst’s career away from minimalism and “the imagined mechanical painter” toward a painting that delights in the potential haphazardness of the medium, as well as the artist’s own fallibility as a creator. Using a conceptual approach, Hirst explores questions of beauty, color and excess in these paintings. Rich in color and striking in number, Hirst’s Cherry Blossoms are both an appropriation and a tribute to the pictorial art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Presented at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2021, Cherry Blossoms was Damien Hirst’s first museum exhibition in France.
Damien Hirst (born 1965) rose to prominence in the 1990s as one of the Young British Artists, garnering attention for his controversial site-specific pieces. A 1989 graduate of Goldsmiths College, Hirst was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995. Now one of the contemporary art world’s most famous figures, Hirst continues to surprise audiences with a staggering diversity of work, ranging from sculpture and painting to installation and performance art. In 2012, a retrospective of his 30-year career was staged at Tate Modern. Hirst is represented by Gagosian.