Modern Art comes to Torbay

Last year Torbay council brought modern art to Torbay with an installation by Antony Gormley. This year the English Riviera will be hosting a brand new exhibition featuring Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child, Divided.

• Born in Bristol in 1965, Hirst grew up in Leeds and now divides his time between his home in Devon and work in London.

• While studying at Goldsmiths in London, Damien conceived, organised and promoted an exhibition called Freeze featuring work by himself and 16 of his fellow Goldsmith's' students. It is thought that this was the starting point for the "Young British Artists" movement and led to Charles Saatchi beginning to collect his work. 

• In 1990, Charles Saatchi bought Damien's controversial work ‘A Thousand Years’, which consisted of a cow’s head infested with maggots, which become flies and die. A year later, Saatchi offered to pay for whatever art Hirst wanted to make. Hirst created ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’, a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine, which sold for £50,000.

• Hirst's work mostly deals with the exploration of mortality. He is best known for The Natural History series, of which Mother and Child, Divided forms a central part.  

• As a result of his controversial work Hirst’s work has prompted many demonstrations, letters of protest and even some threats from the general public.

• In 1994 one of Hirst’s pieces ‘Flock’, was being exhibited at the Serpentine gallery in London. A rogue artist, Mark Bridger, walked into the gallery and poured black ink into the tank and re-titled the work 'Black Sheep'.

• Hirst doesn’t just work with modern art; he has designed cover art for albums by the Eurythmics, and in 1995 he directed a music video for the Blur song "Country House."

• In September 2008 Hirst sold a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at auction. He raised £111 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. For this reason it is thought that he is the richest living artist in the world.