For an artist synonymous with shock, scale, and spectacle, Damien Hirst’s most revealing works may be his most discreet yet. Damien Hirst: Drawings at Albertina Modern (7 May – 12 October 2025) pulls back the curtain on the YBA titan’s practice, exposing the restless, iterative thinking that fuels his grand provocations. Formaldehyde and diamond skulls give way to pencil marks and ink stains here, yet the subversive impulse remains.
Hirst’s drawings have long played second fiddle to his elaborate installations, treated as studio ephemera rather than standalone works. This exhibition, the first museum survey dedicated to them, dismantles that hierarchy. The selection, spanning feverish 1980s sketches to recent Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable studies, reveals how Hirst’s pen and paper act as laboratory and archive. Some sheets are blueprints for future carnage (early Natural History diagrams dissect the logistics of suspending sharks), while others, like the Spot series variations, become meditations on seriality itself. The most arresting are those that feel like private exorcisms: grotesque anatomical studies and obsessive geometric repetitions that echo Emin’s raw confessionalism filtered through Bacon’s distortion.
The inclusion of Making Beautiful Drawings (1994), a kinetic machine that flings pigment onto rotating discs,(Fairground Spin Art) underscores Hirst’s fixation with chance and control. This theme reverberates through the adjacent Spin drawings. Visitors can crank the contraption, a gimmicky but effective reminder that even Hirst’s most calculated works flirt with chaos.
Curatorial gambits pay off in the ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ section, where faux-archaeological sketches—meticulously aged with coffee stains and “water damage”—expose the artist’s sleight of hand. Placed near actual sculptures from the series, the drawings become accomplices in Hirst’s grand fiction, their faux-scholarly annotations winking at art history’s mythmaking machinery.
If the exhibition stumbles, it’s in the inevitable shadow of Hirst’s market juggernaut. Some sketches feel like footnotes to more famous works, and the inclusion of sculptures, while contextually useful, occasionally distracts from the drawings’ intimacy. Yet when the show leans into that vulnerability—the crumpled notebook pages, the crossed-out lines—it delivers something rare: Hirst unguarded, before the gloss and the hype.
Albertina Modern’s triumph lies in reframing drawing not as a side project, but as Hirst’s central nervous system. These are the bones beneath the formaldehyde, and they’re far more unsettling than any pickled livestock. Some of the drawings in this exhibition are complete and finished artworks; others are working notes. I liked this show and highly recommend it. ****star
Damien Hirst: Drawings Albertina Modern, Vienna – Artlyst Review/Photos P C Robinson © Artlyst 2025
Damien Hirst: Drawings runs at Albertina Modern, Vienna, until 12 October 2025.