Damien Hirst | Spot Paintings & Butterfly Works

Damien Hirst (b. 1965) is the most commercially successful British artist of his generation and one of the defining figures of the Young British Artists movement that transformed the international perception of British art in the late 1980s and 1990s. Born in Bristol and trained at Goldsmiths, where he curated the landmark Freeze exhibition in 1988 — an act of institutional self-promotion that announced a new generation of British artists to the art world on their own terms — he has spent the decades since producing work of genuine formal ambition and consistent cultural provocation.

His practice is built around a sustained engagement with mortality, desire, science, and the relationship between beauty and death. The spot paintings — grids of pharmaceutical-coloured circles, each one unique in colour combination, the series now running to thousands of individual works — explore the relationship between the unique and the reproducible, the handmade and the mechanical, the individual and the system. The butterfly works find in the most beautiful of natural objects a symbol of transformation, brevity, and the specific quality of beauty that depends on its own fragility. The Natural History series — the shark, the sheep, the cow preserved in formaldehyde — confronts mortality with a directness that the history of painting has always approached obliquely.

His work is held in Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. His 2008 Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale at Sotheby's — conducted during the global financial crisis — generated £111 million, the largest single-artist auction in history at the time.

The Currency NFT project, the Cherry Blossom series painted during lockdown, and the Butterfly Heart prints — available through Creed Gallery alongside The Currency exhibition posters published by Heni — represent his practice across multiple periods and formats. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.