Damien Hirst

Controversial, obsessive, and eclectic in practice, Damien Hirst played a key role in reigniting the British art scene in the 1980s and 1990s with multidisciplinary works that range from paintings and sculptures to installations and films. Hirst fearlessly and often playfully captures the heartbeat of contemporary life in works that investigate the meeting of art, science, media, and popular culture. Although the artist is best known for his animals in formaldehyde tanks, a meditation on our obsession with death and dying, he has also created sculptures that tempt gravity and other laws of physics as well as a series of spin paintings, two of which are included in Let's Entertain. Hirst called a different series of paintings based on pharmaceuticals "visual candy," and that description fits these works as well. In these colorful creations, Hirst elevates a popular children's arts and crafts activity to high art, using a special spin wheel, huge round canvases, and glossy house paints. These machine-made paintings, which take five minutes to produce, raise larger questions about the definition of art and authorship and simultaneously allude to the role of entertainment and pleasure in art-making.