Viewing Damien Hirst: Natural History

Enter Gagosian Britannia Street and you’ll come face to face with sharks, sheep, fish and calves. They are preserved in formaldehyde of course, but the effect is still somewhat unsettling. But that’s what Damien Hirst intended: ‘I wanted a shark that’s big enough to eat you, and in a large enough amount of liquid so that you could imagine you were in there with it,’ he once said of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a fourteen-foot tiger shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde.

Currently installed across the Britannia Street gallery are more than 20 iconic examples spanning a 30-year period. Shown alongside early works, including The Impossible Lovers (1991), a cabinet filled with glass jars containing preserved cow’s organs, are his complex tableaux such as The Pursuit of Oblivion (2004), in which animal carcasses are joined by other objects including knives and a chain mail glove.

Part of Hirst’s takeover of Britannia Street gallery, Natural History is the first ever show dedicated to his formaldehyde sculptures. It highlights the artist’s ongoing interest in the link between art and science, while also exploring Hirst’s meditations on life, death, faith and fact. Love it or hate it, this exhibition will get under your skin.