Damien Hirst emerged from Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s as, first and foremost, a conceptual artist — working in the lineage of Duchamp's readymades, where systems and ideas outweigh the artist's own hand. While still a student, he organised the seminal exhibition Freeze in 1988, in a disused Docklands building, bringing together fellow Goldsmiths students including Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, and Fiona Rae — the nucleus of what would become the Young British Artists, and a show that attracted the collector Charles Saatchi almost immediately.

That conceptual core runs in two directions across his practice. Toward Pop Art, it produced the Spot Paintings — precisely arranged coloured circles repeated without hierarchy — alongside his Medicine Cabinets and pharmaceutical artworks, including the print series The Last Supper (1999–2000), which reproduces drug packaging with British foods replacing medication names, binding medicine to faith, consumption, and salvation. Toward abstraction, it produced the Spin Paintings, a technique Damien Hirst first saw demonstrated as a child on the BBC's Blue Peter and began making himself in 1992: household paint poured onto a rotating canvas, the composition determined by centrifugal force and chance rather than gesture.

Mortality runs through nearly everything else. His Natural History series uses preserved animals in formaldehyde-filled vitrines, most famously Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a tiger shark suspended mid-tank. Mother and Child (Divided) (1993), a cow and calf split into four separate glass tanks, won him the Turner Prize in 1995. For the Love of God (2007), a platinum skull set with 8,601 diamonds, was exhibited with an asking price of £50 million and reportedly sold for that figure to a consortium that included Hirst himself — the exact circumstances have since been debated, making it more accurate to call £50 million a reported price than a straightforward transaction.

Damien Hirst has repeatedly challenged the relationship between artist, gallery, and market directly. Beautiful Inside My Head Forever (2008), a two-day Sotheby's auction of 223 new artworks sold straight from the studio, generated £111.6 million — a landmark that made the market's own mechanics part of the artwork itself. Major institutional recognition has followed at Tate Modern (2012) and, in 2017, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, staged simultaneously across 5,000 square metres at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice. The Currency (2021) extended the same interrogation into blockchain: ten thousand unique artworks, each tied to an NFT, with collectors forced to choose between the digital token and the physical piece — the alternative destroyed once the choice was made.

Today, Damien Hirst's art spans painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking, still returning to the same questions of life, death, belief, and value that have defined it since Goldsmiths. For a deeper exploration of those themes, read our Damien Hirst editorial →

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde, remains the single most recognisable Damien Hirst artwork — confronting viewers with the paradox of encountering death while very much still alive.

Mother and Child (Divided) (1993), a bisected cow and calf displayed in four separate vitrines, won the British artist the 1995 Turner Prize and remains one of the defining images of the Young British Artists generation.

For the Love of God (2007), a diamond-encrusted platinum skull set with 8,601 stones, transformed the centuries-old memento mori tradition into a genuine spectacle of value and mortality — reportedly sold for £50 million.

The Currency (2021), ten thousand hand-painted dot artworks each paired with a corresponding NFT, forced collectors to choose between the digital token and the physical painting — turning the question of where value actually resides into the artwork itself.

Sanctum (2009), a suite of six Damien Hirst etchings arranging butterfly wings into dense, symmetrical kaleidoscope patterns, takes its individual titles — Minaret, Altar, Belfry, Chancel, Dome, Spire — directly from church architecture, evoking stained-glass windows and religious contemplation through purely visual means.

Damien Hirst's engagement with fine art prints and editions is not secondary to his practice — it is structurally inseparable from it. The same conceptual logic driving his installations — seriality, systems, the tension between the unique and the reproduced — finds its most precise expression in Damien Hirst prints and editioned artworks.

The artist's first major print series, The Last Supper (1999), established the terms: thirteen screenprints in an edition of 150, reimagining pharmaceutical packaging with British foods replacing medication names, which won the Ljubljana Biennial Grand Prize in 2001. The Spot prints, derived from his Pharmaceutical paintings, remain among the most actively traded Damien Hirst editions on the secondary market — uniform coloured dots on white ground, no two colours repeated, the artist's hand deliberately suppressed. His In a Spin series translates the same rotational technique behind the Spin Paintings into signed prints, while Colour Space replaces mechanical precision with visibly hand-applied daubs.

The butterfly motif, central to his practice since 1991, spans etchings, foil block prints, and giclée on aluminium; The Souls series (begun 2010) uses a three-step metallic layering process, while The Empresses extends the motif into monumental kaleidoscopic compositions named after historical female rulers — Suiko, Taytu Betul, and Theodora among them, in a similar spirit to the cathedral-inspired Sanctum series, whose individual titles — Minaret, Altar, Belfry — borrow directly from church architecture. Further series — including The Elements, The Virtues, and The Currency — demonstrate the continuing range and conceptual ambition of Hirst's editioned output.

For collectors, Damien Hirst editions offer direct access to the visual language of one of the most consequential living artists, at a fraction of unique-artwork prices but with the same conceptual density. Traditional edition sizes typically run 50 to 150, though select open editions have reached several thousand. Artworks are held in the permanent collections of Tate, the Guggenheim, and the Astrup Fearnley Museum.