First gaining acclaim and criticism for his Natural History series, which consisted of animals suspended in formaldehyde-filled glass and steel tanks, English conceptual artist Damien Hirst explores themes of death, rebirth, morality, and beauty in his extensive body of work. Hirst’s painting, Lamb is part of his series, the Reverence Paintings, in which Hirst applied dabs of color and flecks of gold leaf on monochrome canvases. The layered canvases with thick, impasto color dots create a sense of visual haze and showcase Hirst’s sense of color as well as the influence of pointillism on his work. The Reverence Paintings series is just one iteration of Hirst’s famous spot paintings, an art style he has been producing in many forms since 1986. Hirst first started making his signature spot paintings to challenge traditional artistic forms, explore new methods of expression and experiment with color and structure. He draws inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Fauvism, and Pointillism.
Damien Hirst studied Fine Art at Goldsmith College, London and was a member of a group known as the Young British Artists. He was the subject pf his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery in 1991 and has gone on to become one of the most successful and wealthy artists in the United Kingdom today, earning the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize in 1995. More recently, in 2012, the Tate Modern, London hosted Hirst’s first museum retrospective and in 2015, he opened his own art space in London, the Newport Street Gallery.
