Synopses & Reviews
From the Cradle to the Grave presents a key selection of drawings and sketches produced by the famed English artist and provocateur Damien Hirst over the past 15 years. For Hirst, drawing is a way of maintaining the flow of imagination, and he does it constantly. Ranging from raw, impulsive sketches to detailed and well-thought-out drawings, these works allow us to explore the artist's preoccupations and passions and his fascination with the ambiguity at the heart of human experience: the confusing relations between art and life, life and death, image and reality, communion and isolation.
The drawings are complemented by a selection of thumbnail photographs of finished sculptures and paintings. Accompanying essays by well-known writers Annuska Shani and A. A. Gill help the reader make connections between the drawings and Hirst's other works of art. Exquisitely produced using a six-color printing process, From the Cradle to the Grave illuminates how Hirst's compelling drawings were conceived and shows us the vitality behind their creation.
Synopsis
Following Damien Hirst's Biennale Grand Prize, which he was awarded in 2001 for The Last Supper prints, Ljubljana International Biennale of Graphic Arts invited the artist to produce an entirely new show for their 25th Biennale in 2003. In response, Hirst exhibited his first ever exhibition of drawings which, spanning his career, consisted of approximately 100 pieces. Many were sourced from private and public collections and displayed the studious, preliminary and imaginative workings of the artist. A number of drawings dated form his early teenagehood, others were lent by close friends, who had been given personal drawings by the artist. Included in the exhibition were a number of preparatory sketches for later and larger works including paintings and sculptures. This publication reproduces over 300 drawings and is a fascinating and diverse insight into the artist's working mind and methods, it manages to convey his humour and integrity in the making process. In the words of Hugh Allan, these drawings should be seen as the spirits or shadows of more robust 'living' things ... Urgent to render and explanation, Hirst has the energy of a dying man desperate to tell us a truth; as the title of the show suggests, cradle and grave bracket what lies between.
About the Author
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol and studied fine art at Goldsmiths College in London. In 1995, he won the prestigious Turner Prize. He has had recent solo exhibitions at the White Cube, London; the Marble Palace, Russia; Saatchi Gallery, London; Gagosian Gallery, New York; and Tate Gallery, London.