Damien Hirst

Walking into the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan to look for the art piece “The Physical Impossibility in the Mind of the Living” was a strange experience. For one thing, I had never been to the museum before, and because the museum is so large I wandered around for a while before even finding “Physical Impossibility.” The rest of museum is filled with the kind of art I would expect, mostly paintings from a long, long time ago, from around the Renaissance times—and then all of a sudden, there was “Physical Impossibility,” which is literally a dead shark in a glass tank filled with formaldehyde, completely different than anything else in the museum. Even though I had seen it online, it was a whole different experience seeing it up close.

Damien Hirst, the British artist behind the shark in the tank, was born in Bristol, England in 1965, the son of a car salesman, and grew up in a town called Leeds. He studied fine arts at the University of London from 1986 to 1989 (BBC). Throughout the 90s, he was known as a member of the "Young British Artists," a group of artists, like him, who became famous almost right out of art school. Other artists in the group included Tracey Emin and Kieth Tyson (Guardian). In 1995, Hirst won the Turner Prize, a prize given once a year to an “outstanding British visual artist under the age of 50” by the Tate Gallery in London (Gagosian Gallery).

Hirst is probably best known for “The Physical Impossibility in the Mind of the Living,” which has been at the Metropolitan Museum for one year now. He created it back in 1991 and quickly sold it to an art collector names Charles Saatchi (New York Times). By the time Hirst created the shark piece, he was already an artist on the rise. He had already been making works similar to the shark, such as dead lamb floating in a glass tank filled with formaldehyde and also a piece for which both a cow and a calf were cut in half and for each both halves were then put in tanks of formaldehyde. That piece is called “Mother and Child Divided.” It is for that piece he won the Turner Prize. (Guardian).