Scandalous truth about art today

by Petar PLAMENOV

MODERN ART GALLERY
Adress:
1000 SOFIA
10, OBORISHTE STR
+359 2 943 4000
+359 2 946 3000

Vanitas, vanitatum…all is vanity, says the Bible. We often forget that this well-known phrase on the emptiness of human activity gave birth to an artistic theme which has never ceased to inspire artists: the Vanities, and particularly their principal emblem, the figure of a death’s head seen both in the mosaics of Pompeii and on the bikers’ jackets of the Hell’s Angels! Damien Hirst  will visit Bulgaria in September for the first time with an exhibition in MODERN ART GALLERY Sofia.
The Bad boy of Contemporary Art Damien Hirst is ready to go to hell and to forced the vanity to become subject of his inspiration.


Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965. While still a student at Goldsmith's College in 1988, he curated the now renowned student exhibition, Freeze, held in east London. In this exhibition, Hirst brought together a group of young artists who would come to define cutting-edge contemporary art in the 1990s. In 1991, he had his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery, entitled In and Out of Love, in which he filled the gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies, some of which were hatched from the monochrome canvases that hung the walls. In 1992, he was part of the ground breaking Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. In this show, he exhibited his now famous Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. That same year he was nominated for the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize, and later won that coveted award in 1995.


Hirst works with a wide array of materials and across numerous art forms. He tackles the big subjects of love, desire, life and death, and his titles say as much, as in his most renowned work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living of 1991, (Saatchi Collection) which features a 12-foot tiger shark floating in a glass tank of formaldehyde.


His solo exhibition of the same year, In and Out of Love, took place in two rooms, one above the other, in a disused shop in the West End of London. In the lower space, dead butterflies were embedded in the glossy paint of monochrome canvases, while upstairs the complete life cycle of exotic butterflies was acted out as they hatched from pupae, fed, bred and eventually died. Other installation works from this time include wall cabinets displaying such items as pharmaceutical products, bottles and tanks of fish and sections of animals in formaldehyde, shells, and cigarette ends as in Dead Ends Died Out Explored, 1993.