Damien Hirst (B. 1965)

Damien Hirst’s Pharmaceuticals captures the artist’s early, seminal series of pharmaceutical drugs, actual examples of which the artist would famously arrange in medicine cabinets installed along the gallery wall. In this way Hirst is continuing and updating the tradition of the Duchampian ready-made, the Surrealist found object and a Warholian take on cultural trends and the connoisseur’s curiosity cabinet. The cabinet thereby becomes a comment on society’s increase in health awareness, critically pointing out the fashion of managing lifestyles through the consumption of the latest designer drugs which defined the 1980s and 1990s.