Damien Hirst
One of the late-20th century's greatest provocateurs and a polarizing figure in recent art history, Damien Hirst was the art superstar of the 1990s. As a young and virtually unknown artist, Hirst climbed far and fast, thanks to Charles Saatchi, an advertising tycoon who saw promise in Hirst's rotting animal corpses, and gave him a virtually unlimited budget to continue. His shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, wowed and repulsed audiences in 1991. In 1995 (the same year that he won the coveted Turner Prize) Hirst's installation of a rotting bull and cow was banned from New York by public health officials who feared "vomiting among the visitors." Hirst, the Sid Vicious of the art world (the Sex Pistols were his favorite band), is the logical outcome of a process of ultra-commodification and celebrity that began with Andy Warhol.
Original panel of pharmacy wallpaper showing the Pharmaceutical names.
In 1997, for his restaurant called The Pharmacy located at Notting Hill Gate, London, Hirst designed wallpaper (the “wall chart”) based on the pharmaceutical giant Merck’s handbook endpapers, showing pills and products and describing them with their pharmaceutical titles. Merck objected and he withdrew it as an artwork of wallpaper after he had already plastered the restaurant with silver and gold sheets of the material. Initial plans to open further restaurants outside London were quietly dropped and the restaurant itself closed in September 2003. For the massive Pharmacy sale at Sotheby’s in 2004, though, new wallpaper was designed using biblical titles and references to biblical passages. but this is the 1st edition Silver Wallpaper designed for the Pharmacy restaurant, Notting Hill, created by Damien Hirst and printed by Zen Wallcoverings, Blackburn.
The wallpaper section features pharmaceutical text and visuals.
Image Size: 235×185mm
Wall Size: 420×360mm