Damien Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965, and grew up in Leeds in the north of England. He studied at Jacob Kramer College of Art in Leeds and later Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1986-9. Hirst lives and works in Devon and London. He curated the now legendary exhibition Freeze in 1988 whilst still a student and in 1995 he was awarded the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery, London.

Freeze was the first of a group of exhibitions organised and curated by young artists in the late 1980s and early 1990s which presented work in museum sized spaces of disused industrial buildings in the East End of London. These exhibitions signalled a change in the artistic landscape of Britain and many of the exhibited artists went on to establish international reputations in the subsequent decade, while Hirst was to become the most famous artist of his generation and a household name.

Hirst works with a wide array of materials and across numerous art forms. He tackles big subjects of love, desire, life and death, and his titles say as much, as in his most renowned work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), which features a 12-foot tiger shark floating in a glass tank of formaldehyde. His solo exhibition of the same year, In and Out of Love, took place in two rooms, one above the other, in a disused shop in the West End of London. In the lower space, dead butterflies were embedded in the glossy paint of monochrome canvases, while upstairs the complete life cycle of exotic butterflies was acted out as they hatched from pupae, fed, bred and eventually died. Other installation works from this time include wall cabinets displaying such items as pharmaceutical products, bottles and tanks of fish and sections of animals in formaldehyde, shells, and cigarette ends.

In parallel to his sculptural work, Hirst has continued to experiment with works in two dimensions, producing a vast number of paintings and prints. For his Spin series, paintings are made with a machine that centrifugally disperses the paint that is steadily poured onto a shaped canvas surface. This is the same principle we see in his In a Spin portfolio of etchings. Medical and pharmaceutical references feature prominently in his work. For his first major body of prints, The Last Supper (1999), Hirst based the thirteen screenprints on the designs of specific pharmaceutical packets which were chosen for how they looked rather than the properties of the drug. In each, the original drug name is replaced by everyday British café food.

A substantial showing of his work was included in the Third International Istanbul Biennial in 1992. He was selected for the Aperto Section of the 54th Venice Biennale in 1993, where he showed Mother and Child Divided, a work consisting of a cow and calf split in two and displayed in four vitrines of formaldehyde. Hirst’s work has been shown in many important group shows including Twentieth Century British Sculpture at the Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Paris in 1996; Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1997; and Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions include End of An Era, Gagosian Gallery, New York; Dark Trees, Galería Hilario Galguera, Leipzig and Mexico City, 2010; Nothing Matters, White Cube, London, 2009; and For the Love of God, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2008. In 2004, Hirst had his first solo retrospective The Agony and The Ecstasy: Selected Works from 1989-2004, at the Archaeological Museum, Naples.