Robin Pogrebin has the news that Damien Hirst and Gagosian Gallery are working together again after a four year hiatus. According to Pogrebin’s item, Gagosian feels there’s plenty of demand but he hints at the issue bedeviling Hirst’s market:
“He’s a great artist, and it’s exciting to reboot the relationship,” Mr. Gagosian said. “It feels very fresh to me. I know a lot of collectors remain very, very interested in Damien and are extremely curious to see what he’s doing.”
Most market commenters blame the pullback in Hirst’s prices on the 2008 sale Hirst held at Sotheby’s supposedly flooding the market with work. But that sale also marked the end of Hirst’s progression as an artist. With the exception of the ill-received paintings shown at the Wallace Collection in London, Hirst’s work seems more historical than ever.
Here’s how Gagosian’s gallery describes the upcoming Frieze booth devoted to Hirst:
“It will be a classical presentation — an early shark piece, instrument cabinet, medicine cabinet, butterfly painting,” said Millicent Wilner, a director at Gagosian in London, who is the gallery’s Hirst liaison. “We wanted to present him in the way most people think of Damien.”
About Damien Steven Hirst (born 7 June 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is the most prominent[2] member of the group known as the Young British Artists (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned,[4] and is reportedly the United Kingdom’s richest living artist, with his wealth valued at £215m in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
Death is a central theme in Hirst’s works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. The best known of these being The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine (clear display case). He has also made “spin paintings,” created on a spinning circular surface, and “spot paintings”, which are rows of randomly coloured circles created by his assistants.
In September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and bypassing his long-standing galleries. The auction exceeded all predictions, raising £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst’s own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde.
