Damien Hirst is one of the leading contemporary artists of our time. Since the late 1980s his work has formed a point of reference in debates about the nature of contemporary art. He has frequently provoked public controversy through the audacity of many of his works, as well as his attitude to the systems through which art is made visible and circulates, raising pertinent questions on issues of cultural value and taste. From early in his career, Hirst was dubbed the figurehead of a generation of “Young British Artists” who were a prominent presence in late 20th-century international art. Hirst’s bold personality has become inextricably linked with his artistic output, forming an essential part of its power.

For all the media attention that has surrounded the artist himself, the body of Hirst’s art remains a formidable analysis of contemporary values and the human condition. To Live Forever (For a While), presents a survey of some of Hirst’s most significant works and series, in all their diversity, confronting us in ways that prove at times provoking as well as captivating.

Visible throughout Hirst’s work is the essential issue that has preoccupied humankind, and is arguably the motivation for all art, namely our own mortality. What is the act of creation but an attempt to live forever (for a while)? The inescapable truth that life inevitably ends in death is repeatedly made apparent in Hirst’s work. It is represented or symbolized often to macabre effect, but also evoked through its inverse, intense beauty and visual pleasure. A focus on aesthetic beauty implies a celebration of life as well as its brevity. The duality of horror and beauty stand for Hirst’s core interests: how we divide and reconcile, represent and obscure the fundamental questions of existence that often illuminate contradictions in our societies and beliefs. Hirst’s work confronts us with the realities we often go to great lengths to avoid.

Works from the early period of the artist’s career frequently reveal an interest in a use of multiple forms and systems of arrangement, using everyday domestic materials, such as brightly colored pans, preserved sausages, or colored cardboard boxes. From these beginnings he went on to produce one of his most prolific and iconic series, the Spot Paintings. The Spot Paintings play with the seemingly simple pleasures of color, geometry and pattern. Their palette and composition, as well as their similarity to pills, also link to the colorful medical packaging he used in another early series, the Medicine Cabinets.

The earliest examples of these paintings were included in an ambitious three-part exhibition, Freeze (1988), that the artist organized to showcase his and his peers works while still students, in which he also exhibited Boxes (1988), included in this exhibition. After painting only a few himself, Hirst decided to delegate execution of all remaining Spot Paintings to assistants. Now numbering over 1000, there are many sub-categories of Spot Paintings, all named after types of medical drugs.

Hirst attended Goldsmiths’ College when higher education was free, and therefore open to students from a wide range of backgrounds, and at a time when its art department encouraged students to abandon the traditional division between art forms, and to articulate their ideas confidently. This was the generation who went on to challenge conventions both in art and in access to the art establishment. Apart from their confidence, there was little to unite the varied types of work made by this now legendary generation of British artists, many of whom attended Goldsmiths but also other London colleges. As a loose group they became known for the shocking nature of their work, much of which can be attributed to Hirst’s own brand of gothic humor. His use of formaldehyde preservation was also inspired by his unofficial visits to an anatomy museum in his hometown of Leeds as a teenager, to practice life drawing. This early engagement with the physicality and preservation of dead bodies was to inflect his later work.

As well as the works composed of animals preserved in formaldehyde-filled tanks, which later became known as the Natural History series for their similarity to specimens found in museums, Hirst’s early interest in the medical environment also extended to medicines, the means by which we delay the inevitability of death. In 1991 Hirst produced a work long in his mind, an entire tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde with the title The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The work and its title defined the artist and his interests like a manifesto. The confrontation with the terrifying animal, coupled with the fascination of being able to scrutinize the creature in its arrested state, continued in further series of sharks in formaldehyde, both whole and dissected. Two examples are Death Denied (2008) and Death Explained (2007), whose titles suggest the same dichotomy at the center of the artist’s concerns–our desire both to know and to obscure the truth. A single white sheep was the subject of a work titled Away from the Flock (1994), which during an exhibition was temporarily vandalized by a protester, who poured black ink into the formaldehyde filled tank. This led Hirst to produce his own black versions, one of which is titled Black Sheep (Twice) (2007). Hirst often uses contrasting aspects in his work. Here the white sheep, characteristically a symbol of Christ in religious imagery, and associated with purity and innocence, is contrasted with the black sheep, which was traditionally superstitiously feared and viewed as an outcast.

In parallel, Hirst developed his series of Medicine Cabinet works. These sterile, white cabinets can be seen as anatomical models, in that many contain drugs relating to different parts of the body. The first 1989 series of cabinets, including Holidays and Problems, take their titles from the tracks on the Sex Pistols’ only album, marrying the anarchistic and self-destructive tendencies of punk with Hirst’s interest in the body and its inevitable decline. The Medicine Cabinets and Spot Paintings share an allusion to how supposedly utilitarian medicines are displayed commercially with colors and designs that are designed to be appealing. Beyond his interest in the packaging design of the drugs, Hirst’s interest was initially sparked by the almost religious belief and certainty that medicines provoked.

Further series of cabinets made of stainless steel followed, some displaying rows of white pills, as seen in Memories Lost, Fragments of Paradise (2003), while others were plated with gold. The gold cabinet Judgement Day (2009) contains rows of Cubic Zirconia crystals. A form of synthesized diamond used in jewelry, the substance originated from the world of science when it was developed for use as a component of lasers and medical equipment. Containing objects of similar size and form to tablets, these cabinets make direct reference to the idea of commercial display and value.