Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, England. His mother worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau. He never met his biological father; his mother married his stepfather when Hirst was two, and the couple divorced 10 years later. He grew up drawing compulsively, shoplifting art supplies, and visiting morgues as a teenager. The bodies fascinated him. Death became his subject before he understood what art was.

At Goldsmiths College in 1986, he found chaos and permission. But he didn’t wait for institutions to validate him. In 1988, while still a student, he curated Freeze in a derelict warehouse in London’s Docklands, exhibiting work by 16 artists including himself. He designed the catalog, painted the walls, made it look professional. Charles Saatchi visited. Everything changed. Three years later, Hirst suspended a fourteen-foot tiger shark in formaldehyde and called it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Critics called it sensationalist. The public couldn’t look away. Saatchi bought it for £50,000.

Hirst understood that art required systems, not just hands. The Spot Paintings began in 1986 and never stopped—over 1,400 pharmaceutical-colored dots arranged in grids, most painted by assistants following his instructions. The Spin Paintings worked similarly: pour paint on a rotating canvas, let physics create the composition. He hired teams to execute his concepts at industrial scale, turning his studios into factories. In 2007, he encrusted a platinum skull with 8,601 diamonds, spent £14 million making it, and sold it for £50 million to a consortium that included himself. The following year, he bypassed galleries entirely and auctioned 218 works directly through Sotheby’s for £111 million—on the day Lehman Brothers collapsed.

His strengths: recognizing that art functions as spectacle and system simultaneously, industrializing creative production while maintaining authorship, generating controversy that sustains market value, technical ambition requiring fabrication expertise most artists avoid.

Career highlights: Freeze exhibition launching the YBAs, the shark that made him infamous, Turner Prize in 1995, the diamond skull, the Sotheby’s auction that broke records, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable in Venice, simultaneous spot painting shows across eleven Gagosian galleries worldwide, work in Tate, MoMA, Guggenheim, and major collections globally.