Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (Installation View), via Art Observed

After much anticipation, the crowds of the Venice Biennale have finally packed through the doors of the Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana to take their turn at the visual tour de force of Damien Hirst’s Treasures of the Wreck of the Unbelievable.  The show, which opened last month at François Pinault’s pair of exhibition spaces in the city, has garnered considerable discussion over the past several months since its announcement, and with good reason.  Hirst’s exhibition is a challenging, and often confounding experience, taking on the museum as a form, and pushing it to its symbolic limits.

Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (Installation View), via Art Observed

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The Art News has an interesting piece on the sale of Damien Hirst’s monumental exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, which seems to be attracting interested buyers including the Mugrabi and Nahmad families, as well as Qiao Zhibing, the Chinese collector behind Tank Shanghai.  “You see that and you go, ‘Wow,’ ” says one buyer, collector Francois Odermatt. “I want to have art where if people see it, they go ‘Wow.’” (more…)

Andy Warhol, 20 Pink Maos (1979), via Phillips

Complementing the offering of new works across town at Regent’s Park, Phillips London has opened a week of auctions around Frieze Week, closing out its 30-lot sale this evening with a consistent sale, seeing 6 of the evening’s 30 lots go unsold to reach a final tally of £17,867,750. (more…)

A scientific research team monitoring the Tate Modern’s Damien Hirst show in 2012 has reported that the exhibition had unhealthy levels of formaldehyde leaking into the air.  The readings come out to be ten times the 0.5 parts per million levels set by the EU, a charge that Hirst’s Science LTD. flatly denies.  “At five parts per million your eyes would be streaming and you would be in serious physical discomfort,” a spokesperson says. (more…)

Damien Hirst is planning on opening a new edition of his famed restaurant “Pharmacy” at his Newport Street Gallery next year, the Evening Standard reports.  The new space inherits Hirst’s penchant for controversy from the original, which was ultimately barred by the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain over its confusing name. (more…)

Damien Hirst’s £25m, 37,000 sq ft Newport Street Gallery has opened, drawing rave reviews from The Guardian.  “I’ve felt guilt owning work that’s stored away in boxes where no one can see it. Having a space where I can put on shows from the collection is a dream come true,” Hirst says. (more…)

The North Devon District Council has approved Damien Hirst‘s plan to build an entire town in the area. Known as the South Extension, the development will include shops, offices, a school, and over 750 residential homes. While the plan’s supporters point to the construction opportunities the development will bring to the area, critics are more focused on the longterm repercussions, expressing concern over the future town’s effect of the environment and calling it “an unemployment black spot”. (more…)

A new gallery is scheduled to open in 2016 at Goldsmith College, University of London, which will showcase art created by the college’s current students and alumni, who include Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, and Sarah Lucas. The gallery will be housed in the renovated water tanks of the early twentieth century Laurie Grove Baths, a project which will cost 1.8 million pounds. Sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, who announced the plans alongside architect Sir David Chipperfield, called the future gallery a “resource for the university and for London.”

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A recent Bloomberg article features an examination of the direct correlation between value appreciation and the price of pieces at auction. By studying the auction sales of the top ten artists over the past ten and twenty years, the article suggests that, in the ever-shifting art market, the safest way to ensure a profit is to buy big names like Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter, and Damien Hirst at big prices.

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In May or June of next year London might finally play host to Damien Hirst’s new venture, an exhibition space built to house his considerable collection of contemporary art. In the works since 2012, the South London space plans to feature a restaurant and office space alongside six separate galleries filled with pieces by artists such as Jeff Koons, Francis Bacon, and, of course, Hirst himself. (more…)

A strange disagreement has arisen over the authenticity of a site-specific Damien Hirst spot painting, after a homeowner has attempted to remove the work from its location and sell it.  Jess Simpson purchased the home where the work was installed, and attempted to mount the piece on aluminum to resell it, but was met with a statement by Hirst’s Science LTD. which stated the work no longer could be considered authentic as Simpson did not own the certificate, and could not remove a site-specific work to profit from it: “The ownership of a wall painting in the series titled Wall Spots always resides with the owner of the Wall Spots signed certificate, which accompanies the art work.” (more…)

Damien Hirst has donated the gilded skeleton of a woolly mammoth, secured inside a steel and glass case, for auction in benefit of non-profit amfAR’s 21st Cinema Against AIDS gala.  “I wanted to play with these ideas of legend, history and science by gilding the skeleton and placing it within a monolithic gold tank,” Hirst said. “It’s such an absolute expression of mortality, but I’ve decorated it to the point where it’s become something else, I’ve pitched everything I can against death to create something more hopeful.” (more…)

A minimalist portrait of Disney icon Mickey Mouse, done by Damien Hirst, is up for sale next month at Christie’s in London to benefit the Kids Company charity.  Created using Hirst’s signature “dot” technique, the portrait plays on a long history of pop art appropriation of the character.  “Mickey Mouse represents happiness and the joy of being a kid and I have reduced his shape down to the basic elements of a few simple spots. I hope people love it, because it is still instantly recognizable – Mickey Mouse is such a universal and powerful icon.”  Hirst says. (more…)

Artist Damien Hirst at Blain Southern Gallery. All photos by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed.

As Frieze London prepares to open its doors to the press and VIPs tomorrow morning in Regent’s Park, gallerists around the city are aiming to pull out all the stops in attracting collectors during the week’s events.  Such seemed to be the case with Blain|Southern‘s Candy, a blockbuster exhibition of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Damien Hirst focusing on the artists’ shared material and aesthetic interests in the sugary snack as artistic medium, which opened last night.

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Damien Hirst’s newest sculptures, depicting the stages of life for a gestating fetus, have been unveiled in Qatar.  Monumental in scale, the 14 bronze statues are estimated to have cost $20 million, and signal a new step towards acceptance of western art and artists in the country.  “To have something like this is less daring than having a lot of nudity,” said Sheikha al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani of the Qatar Museum Authority . “There is a verse in the Koran about the miracle of birth,” she said. “It is not against our culture or our religion.” (more…)

Damien Hirst has unveiled his latest project, a children’s ABC’s book featuring a letter for letter survey of own work, and a different, corresponding font.  The artist spoke with The Guardian this week, discussing the book, his inspirations as a young artist, and his thoughts on “painting like a child.”  “The childlike quality of some of Picasso’s drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete visions, feelings and portraits through a continuous line.” (more…)

Damien Hirst’s Science Gallery and Studios has selected a design for construction, a 9,000 square meter space in Stroud, England that will make it the largest art production site in the world.  Designed by Bath-based firm Designscape, Science will feature numerous studios, spaces, and a formaldehyde room for Hirst’s famous preserved works.  The building is also distinguished by its shifting, colorful facade.  “The aim was to produce a wall that was intriguingly blue from one direction and green from the other,” says Designscape. “If you stand halfway down the elevation, you are not quite sure whether the building is blue or green.” (more…)

Details are emerging about a major exhibition of work by Damien Hirst, billed as the largest exhibition of work by the artist yet to be assembled, slated to open later this year in Doha, Qatar.  The show, titled Relics, will cull work from the full range of the artist’s work, and will include a number of the artist’s diamond-encrusted work. (more…)

Damien Hirst’s spot paintings are once again the subject of analysis and discussion, this time in the New York Times, which looks forward to the publication of his catalogue raisonné for the series this fall.  Released by Other Criteria, the book will catalog the full series of spot paintings, 1,365 in all, and is speculated by some as a way to lend authenticity to the work of an artist whose auction prices have fallen in recent years.  “He needs to regain the trust of the marketplace,” said Jeff B. Rabin, an advisor and co-founder at Artvest Partners. “It seems the catalog is one measure he could perhaps take to start to rectify some of the ill feeling out in the marketplace.” (more…)

Billed as the world’s largest art exhibition, the newly announced Art Everywhere project will turn billboards and poster sites around the United Kingdom into exhibition spaces for works from the national collection.  The project is curated in part by the British public, who will vote on their favorite works from a curated shortlist.  Damien Hirst has offered a work for exhibition, and is a vocal supporter of the project.  “Art is for everyone, and everyone who has access to it will benefit from it. This project is amazing and gives the public a voice and an opportunity to choose what they want to see on their streets.“  He says. (more…)

The Guardian reports on Damien Hirst’s recent appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, where the artist admitted to getting so drunk after winning the Turner Prize’s £20,000 grand prize that he woke up in the morning forgetting where he had left the check.  Measuring his creative successes against the dangerous lives of Romantic-era legends like Egon Schiele and Joseph Turner, the newspaper uses Hirst to question the nature of the artist in an increasingly stabile, safe society. (more…)

Damien Hirst, Forbidden Fruit (2012-3), via White Cube Hong Kong

White Cube Hong Kong is currently presenting Entomology Cabinets and Paintings, Scalpel Blade Paintings and Colour Charts, a broad exhibition of new work by British artist Damien Hirst. Through the three series on view, Hirst explores life’s dualities through the beauty and horror of both the Natural world and modernity.

Damien Hirst, The Judged (2012), via White Cube Hong Kong

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Artnet’s Katherine Markley is reporting on the continued growth of the art market for contemporary female artists, focusing in particular on the work of Yayoi Kusama.  Analyzing sales figures for the last several years, Markley points out that Kusama has vastly exceeded the current sales figures for both Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons since 2007, and reframes the question of female artists’ presence in terms of comparison to direct market competitors, in favor of the 100 highest selling works list often cited in news articles and auction reports. (more…)

British artist Damien Hirst has announced that he will release a complete catalog documenting over 1,400 “spot paintings” that the artist has done over the past 27 years.  The artist’s highly controversial series, consisting of rows of multi-colored dots and usually painted by his assistants, has occasionally irked collectors and followers, despite claims that “every single spot painting contains my eye, my hand and my heart”.  He says. (more…)