Damien Hirst

The new-pop icon of postmodernity is Damien Hirst, a British artist (1965) who has become famous for two works in particular. The first is a sculpture displaying a tiger shark of over four metres suspended in a tank of formaldehyde in front of whose open jaws the viewer finds it hard to believe that it is lifeless. The spectacular and very expensive operation subtends a message, namely the transience of the animal's life and body and thus by translation also of the human body.

In the second very famous work, ‘For the love of God’ of 2007, the seventeenth-century theme of Vanitas is explicitly made evident by an authentic human skull cast in platinum and made pop by the equally real diamonds that stud it (for an objective value of £14 million). A sedative metaphor, apotropaic but at the same time pulp, the work is the visual paradox of the only absolute value acknowledged to man by the globalised consumer civilisation, namely the capacity for boundless and narcissistic accumulation of wealth, as opposed to the greatest taboo of our society. Inside the exhibition we find a silkscreen with enamel and diamond powder that replicates the image of this famous work.