Damien Hirst

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce a retrospective exhibition of the drawings of Damien Hirst. The exhibition, entitled 'Corpus' Damien Hirst Drawings 1981-2006, will open at Gagosian Gallery in New York on Friday, 15th September and continue through Friday, 28th October, 2006.

Bringing together over 200 drawings, the exhibition offers a historical insight into a rarely seen aspect of the artist's work and working process. Included are rarely seen early works made when Hirst was a young student; seminal pencil drawings for major sculptures such as ,The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), A Thousand Years (1991), The Acquired Inability to Escape (1992), Away from the Flock, (1994) and The Hat Makes the Man (2003); preparatory drawings for early spot paintings and medicine cabinets; as well as large-scale series of drawings based on The Stations of The Cross (2004) and proposals for future projects.

In his drawings, through image as well as text, Hirst plays out his ideas on paper with the urgency and immediacy of an artist whose irrepressible, exhaustive imagination is engaged in a constant, passionate pursuit to describe, demarcate, question, invent, discover and divine. In ,Can't See the Wood for the Trees (1996), he offers a poetic insight into the conceptual framework of his drawings, chronicling their importance in the developmental process of his work, "constructing spaces, drawings for sculptures, ideas become reality, making spaces, ideas made real, in search of reality, looking for Mr. Goodsex, nothing is a problem for me, he tried to internalize everything, from head to paper."

As Annushka Shani has described, "through [Hirst's] drawings we can explore his preoccupations and passions which centre on the ambiguity at the heart of human experience; the confusing relations between art and life, life and death and image and reality, change and stasis, communion and isolation, entrapment and escape, love and relationships." The corpus, or body of work contained in this retrospective exhibition reveals the breadth and depth of thought at the heart of Hirst's creative output.

A fully illustrated catalogue with a conversation between the artist and John Gray and a text by Simon Baker will accompany the exhibition.

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965 and attended Goldsmiths College. In 1989, he curated Freeze, a benchmark exhibition for British art, and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995. A survey of works from 1989-2004 was recently held at the Museo Nazionale Archaeologico di Napoli (2005). His monumental sculpture, The Virgin Mother,, is currently on view at the Royal Academy, London.

Pressetext

Gagosian Gallery Madison - New York

Damien Hirst
Corpus: Drawings 1981-2006