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Damien Hirst, born 1965 in Bristol, lives and works in London. With works known for both their formal beauty and their shock value, Hirst has made some of the most-discussed art of the 90s. Hirst´s work suggests the transience of life. His sealed-up vitrines-as-
mausoleums encourage the viewer to reflect on time and vast cycles of mortality, not only within the sculpture but all around us. Since 1988, Hirst has been making dot paintings that involve color systems. These paintings form a fascinating parallel to his sculptures, and provide an encoded window onto his thinking. In the paintings, Hirst plays with rules and randomness by setting up an open, but highly structured system. All the paintings have a regular grid of solid, arbitrarily-colored dots. Though his paintings do not resemble his sculptures, they are not dissimilar in content: Hirst attempts to imbue abstract elements of painting with his sense of the awfulness, or at least the arbitrariness, of life.
From Wall Works
