Damien Hirst: “LOVE”
Paul Stolper Gallery, 31 Museum Street, London
February 9 – 21, 2015
Paul Stolper presents “LOVE,” a pop-up exhibition of prints and sculptural editions by Damien Hirst. The exhibition will run from the 9th of February to the 21st of February 2015, over Valentine’s Day, and will focus exclusively on the theme of love. As Hirst says: ‘Love is a beautiful thing and I see it as a small antidote to all the horror in the world.’
The exhibition includes ‘LOVE Gold’, a portfolio of love heart prints each foil blocked with a single butterfly. Eight of the hearts are silkscreened, and six are in gold leaf. Damien Hirst’s ‘LOVE Gold’ is the first of two portfolios, the second, titled ‘LOVE Silver’, will be released in June 2015. It will include eight silkscreen prints in colours different to ‘LOVE Gold’ and six prints in silver leaf, each foil blocked with a single butterfly.
Also included will be two love heart pill sculptures ‘♡YU 4 EVA’, as well as ‘Love Struck’, a cast heart pierced by a crossbow bolt suspended in a sweet jar.
Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. In 1984, he moved to London, where he worked in construction before studying for a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College from 1986 to 1989. Whilst in his second year, he conceived and curated a group exhibition entitled ‘Freeze’. The show is commonly acknowledged to have been the launching point not only for Hirst, but for a generation of British artists.
Since the late 1980s, Hirst has used a varied practise of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing to explore the complex relationships between art, life and death, explaining: “Art’s about life and it can’t really be about anything else… there isn’t anything else.” Through work that includes the iconic shark in formaldehyde, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991) and ‘For the Love of God’ (2007), a platinum cast of a skull set with 8,601 flawless pavé-set diamonds, he investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the uncertainties at the heart of human experience. Hirst lives and works in Gloucester, Devon and London.
