Hirst is a British assemblagist, painter, and conceptual artist whose deliberately provocative art addresses beauty, death and rebirth, medicine, technology, and mortality. He was considered an 'enfant terrible' of the 1990s art world and presented dead animals in formaldehyde as art. Hirst would represent everyday objects to shocking effect and in the process, he questioned the very nature of art. In 1995 he won Tate Britain's Turner Prize, one of Britain's premier awards for contemporary art.
Having grown up in Leeds, he moved to London in the early 1980s beginning his artistic life as a painter and assemblagist. From 1986 to 1989 he attended Goldsmiths College, 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 fellow students who later became known as the YBAs (Young British Artists) of the 1990s. Hirst's reputation as both an artist and a provocateur quickly increased. 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 underslined his general preoccupation with mortality.
Hirst's later work included paintings made by spin machines, enlarged ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, Large anatomical models of the human body, medicine cabinets filled with pharmaceuticals, other curiosity cabinets filled with found objects, and a diamond-studded platinum-cast human skull entitled 'For the Love of God', possibly the most expensive artwork ever. His references to other artistic movements and artists were many. The common format of huge glass display cases, for example, relied on the precedent of minimalism, while his use of found materials and assistants in making works linked him to other artists of the era, such as the American Jeff Koons, who purposefully demystified the role of the artist's hand.
Never one to abide by he rules, Hirst made headlines (and a fortune) in 2008 when rather than selling through a gallery as is customary, put up a selection of his work at auction accumulating more than USD 200 million. During the 2017 Venice Bienniale he concurrently held his own solo exhibition, "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable," in two separate venues. The vast installation featured sculptures and other objects presented as the remains from a fictional 2000 year old shipwreck off the coast of Africa.