Fra serien «Stations of the Cross», 2004

Damien Steven Hirst (b. 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended. Death is a central theme in Hirst's works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. He has also made "spin paintings," created on a spinning circular surface, and "spot paintings", which are rows of randomly coloured circles created by his assistants.