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Holy cow! Hirst turns to religion
By Nigel Reynolds
(Filed: 09/09/2003) Damien Hirst unveiled his first solo exhibition for eight years yesterday and demonstrated that he has not yet exhausted his repertoire of things to do with dead cows, dead flies or even dead butterflies. | |  | | New works by Damien Hirst at the White Cube Gallery |
In a bloody show that would sit as easily in the Natural History Museum as at his fashionable gallery in London's East End, Hirst has used flayed cows' heads to represent Christ's Apostles. More severed bovine heads, in Hirst's trademark formaldehyde-filled rectangular tanks, represent the four Evangelists. In an act of symbolism supposed to represent the martyrdoms and bloody history of the Christian church, these heads have kitchen knives, scissors and shards of glass and mirror violently embedded in them. | |  | | Hirst's sculpture 'Charity' in Hoxton Square |
Hirst's new theme - having apparently exhausted the more straightforward issues of death and mortality - is religion. The 38-year-old has not had a religious conversion himself but has set out, like painters throughout history, to put his own spin on the Christian church and its saints, said his gallery, White Cube, yesterday. | |  | | Butterfly montage, 'Amazing Revelations' |
But the man who trades on shock - every few years he has conjured up startling new imagery - may disappoint those hoping for a new Hirst trend. Much more shocking is that the omnivore collector Charles Saatchi has not yet bought any of the new pieces. And, also, that a 22ft, six-ton bronze blow-up copy of a 1960s Spastics Society collecting box by Hirst has already been sold for a startling £1.5 million to Kim Chang-Il, a Korean retailer who intends to place it in a gallery attached to his department store in Seoul. Hirst has placed the work outside White Cube in Hoxton Square. He has made two other casts of the model, named Charity, with identical price tags and sale negotiations are under way for one of them. The original charity box, once common on high streets, has been altered by showing the girl's collection box jemmied open. Up to 2,000 Hirst fans from the art, pop and fashion worlds will attend the exhibition's opening party tonight. Called Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, the exhibition also boasts 13 display cabinets, all dripping with animal blood, representing Christ and the Apostles. Each contains items connected with the stories of the Apostles' death and paths of suffering - lots more blood, a rope, crucifixes and spears. Elsewhere, Hirst has made two montages using the wings of hundreds of butterflies, and 13 gruesome, slightly smelly black canvases each made up of thousands of dead flies, called the Cancer Chronicles. If you don't look too closely, they more closely resemble thousands of burnt Rice Krispies. Will Hirst's followers be concerned that after eight years the artist is stuck churning out dessicated animals? Possibly, said Karen Wright, editor of the magazine Modern Painters yesterday. "His [religious] comments and symbolism is so obvious. Taking on religion requires a lightness of touch in the 21st century and I don't see it." For publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page please phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or email syndicat@telegraph.co.uk
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