Damien Steven Hirst, born in 1965 in Bristol, England.

Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s.

In September 2008, Hirst made an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and bypassing his long-standing galleries. The auction raised £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst’s own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde.

Hirst sees the real creative act as being the conception, not the execution, and that, as the progenitor of the idea, he is therefore the artist.

Damien Hirst’s latest series, Cherry Blossoms, is a continuation of his career-long investigation into painting. The artist reinterprets, with playful irony, the traditional subject of landscape painting as well as the great artistic movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Impressionism to Action Painting.

“The Cherry Blossoms are about beauty and life and death. They are extreme—there’s something almost tacky about them. Like Jackson Pollock twisted by love. They’re decorative but taken from nature. They’re about desire and how we process the things around us and what we turn them into, but also about the insane visual transience of beauty—a tree in full crazy blossom against a clear sky. It’s been so good to make them, to be completely lost in colour and in paint in my studio. They’re garish and messy and fragile and about me moving away from Minimalism and the idea of an imaginary mechanical painter and that’s so exciting for me.” – Damien Hirst.