This spring Howard495 is excited to welcome you to our new gallery space at 3528 Commercial Street where we are pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent work by Damien Hirst. Never one to shy from controversy, this exhibit will mark Hirst’s explorative journey into the polarizing NFT space. Both digital and physical work will be presented and will span Hirst’s odyssey into this new age of artistic practice. The exhibition intends to engage its viewers in this contemporary moment that disrupts the fundamental limits of art and good taste, magnifies and questions the functions of the marketplace and re-examines the interconnected relationship between art and money.
Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, grew up in Leeds and today lives and works in London and Gloucestershire. A graduate of Goldsmiths College in 1986, Hirst was one of the most radical conceptual artists of postwar Britain and was the recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize in 1995. He gained prominence and notoriety by making visionary work that was not only shocking but replete with conceptual depth. Today he is considered Britain’s wealthiest living artist, in part due to his rogue manipulation of the marketplace. Since emerging onto the international art scene with his YBA cohorts, Hirst continues to be genre-defying in his examination of oppositional relationships between art and commerce, religion and science, and life and death. Existing outside of the status quo and not one to create work behind the commercial times it is no surprise to see Hirst dipping into the world of NFTs.
People are afraid of change, so you create a kind of belief for them through repetition. It’s like breathing. I’ve always been drawn to series and pairs. A unique thing is quite a frightening object.
— Damien Hirst
