Beneath the formaldehyde and diamond dust, Damien Hirst’s most revealing work has always existed on paper. The Visual/Conceptual Language of Hirst is revealed in a new exhibition and accompanying volume at the Albertina in Vienna. ‘Damien Hirst Drawings’, the compiled works on paper, pull back the curtain on four decades of sketches, diagrams, and draft concepts—many never before exhibited. What emerges isn’t just a chronicle of the YBA’s process, but a memento to the obsessive precision behind his sensational career.
The collection traces Hirst’s evolution from Goldsmiths upstart to art-world juggernaut. Early notebook pages from the 1990s-2020 show meticulous studies of anatomical models—quiet precursors to the shark that would later draw worldwide attention. A 2004 sketch of A Thousand Years (his rotting cow-head installation) reveals calculated annotations about fly lifecycles, proving the work’s grotesque poetry was always more science than spectacle.
Most revealing are the preparatory grids for Spot Paintings, their clinical geometry belying their eventual factory-like production, and a hand-drawn storyboard for Away from the Flock 1994 —the calf rendered in pencil. Even ‘For the Love of God’, his diamond-encrusted skull began as a marginalia doodle, its shape crammed beside a shopping list in 2006.
Hirst’s reputation as an art-world P.T. Barnum obscures his draftsman’s discipline. Here, we see him wrestling with scale (The Physical Impossibility of Death’s tank dimensions adjusted five times), 2007. Occasionally, betraying vulnerability, a pencil study of What Goes Up Must Come Down, 1994, matches a hair dryer with a ping pong ball that “floats in an air jet from the hairdryer”.
The book’s design—mimicking a working sketchbook—amplifies this intimacy with a layout as precise as a Fabergé blueprint. Beyond blueprints, the collection unveils Hirst’s lesser-known graphic experiments, where he designed a way to automate his dot paintings, predating his controversial shift to studio assistants.
Critics who dismiss Hirst as a mere showman might reconsider after seeing his original drawings for his Shark vitrines and the classical style drawings for the Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable.
What makes this archive essential isn’t just its backstage glimpse but also how it reframes Hirst’s legacy. The enfant terrible who once declared “Art is about life and death” emerges as a paradox: part alchemist, part accountant, forever oscillating between the sublime and the cynical.
As the art world grapples with AI and authenticity, these pages remind us that even the most audacious ideas begin humbly—in the quiet drag of a pencil, the crumpled paper, the stubborn refusal to stop questioning. What’s not to like!
The Visual Language of Damien Hirst is on view at Albertina through The accompanying monograph (Publisher, £35) is available now. – PCR
Buy This Book Here