Damien Hirst is arguably the most successful living British artist. He established his reputation, as both an artist and curator, in the 1990s with a new generation of creators known as the YBAs (Young British Artists). 

Since the late 1980s, Damien Hirst has created installations, sculptures, paintings, prints, and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art and beauty, religion and science, and life and death. 

Hirst became one of the most recognized, discussed, and collected provocateurs of our time. His works, such as his iconic sharks or cows in formaldehyde tanks incite strong, visceral responses that divide audiences on both sides of the pond. 

Damien Hirst's "Spot Paintings" began in the late 1980s, but became iconic and revered in the late nineties. All painted by hand they gave the illusion of being mechanically produced. Some of the composition of colors are random, others calculated and some are based on the chemical structure of narcotics and pharmaceuticals.

Around 2016, the artist began to produce a new body of work, this time filling blank surfaces with fields of heavily condensed dots that overlap and sprawl across the sheet. "The Currency" is an output of this recent epoch, serving as an intimate example of his signature (now reimagined) motif.

Introduced as his first NFT series, "The Currency" is an important and pivotal work for Hirst. The artist created 10,000 original paintings, each with a corresponding NFT. Following an application process, the successful purchasers were faced with a decision to either keep the NFT or trade it in for an original painting. The works that were not collected were ultimately burned.

Damien Hirst's artwork is represented in numerous international public collections including the Tate Modern (London), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris). Among many awards and accolades, Hirst was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 1995.

Courtesy of Caviar20