Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst, in full Damien Steven Hirst, (born June 7, 1965, Bristol, England), British assemblagist, painter, and conceptual artist whose deliberately provocative art addresses vanitas and beauty, death and rebirth, and medicine, technology, and mortality. Considered an enfant terrible of the 1990s art world, Hirst presented dead animals in formaldehyde as art. Like the French artist Marcel Duchamp, Hirst employed ready-made objects to shocking effect, and in the process he questioned the very nature of art. In 1995 he won Tate Britain’s Turner Prize, Great Britain’s premier award for contemporary art.