Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated Freeze, an exhibition of his own work and that of his friends and fellow Goldsmiths College students, staged in an unused London warehouse. In the nearly quarter of a century since that pivotal show, Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation.

Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, England. He lives and works in London and Devon. He is one of the most prominent artists to have emerged from the British art scene in the 1990s. Hirst's exploration of imagery is notable for its strong associations to life and death, and to belief and value systems. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 2003; Twentieth Century British Sculpture, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1996; Extreme Abstraction, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 2005; Into Me / Out of Me, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2006; Re-Object, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, 2007; and Color Chart: Reinventing Color 1950 to Today, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008. Solo exhibitions include Internal Affairs, ICA, London, 1991; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, 1997; The Agony and the Ecstasy, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, 2004; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2005; For the Love of God, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 2008 and Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, 2010/1. He received the DAAD fellowship in Berlin in 1994 and won the Turner Prize in 1995.

In April 2012, Hirst had a retrospective survey of his work at the Tate Britain.  

Click here to take a close look at Damien Hirst's controversial art.