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

Hirst grew up in Leeds and moved to London in the early 1980s. He began his artistic life as a painter and assemblagist. From 1986 to 1989 he attended Goldsmiths College in London, and during this time he curated an influential student show, “Freeze,” which was attended by the British advertising mogul and art collector Charles Saatchi. The exhibition showcased the work of a group of Hirst’s classmates who later became known as the successful Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s. Hirst’s reputation as both an artist and a provocateur quickly soared. His displays of animals in formaldehyde and his installations complete with live maggots and butterflies were seen as reflections on mortality and the human unwillingness to confront it. Most of his works were given elaborate titles that underscored his general preoccupation with mortality.