Forever

Damien Hirst’s *Forever* distils the artist’s enduring preoccupation with time, desire, and the uneasy coexistence of beauty and mortality. Executed with Hirst’s characteristically crisp, high-impact finish, the work foregrounds repetition and immaculate surface as both seduction and strategy—inviting close looking while holding the viewer at a clinical distance.

*Forever* sits within the cultural terrain that has defined Hirst’s practice since the 1990s: the commodification of experience, the aesthetics of display, and the contemporary appetite for icons that read instantly yet resist easy resolution.

At once devotional and confrontational, the piece operates as a contemporary memento mori, asserting permanence while quietly exposing its fragility—an emblem of late-capitalist longing rendered with museum-grade precision.

Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. In 1984 he moved to London, where he worked in construction before studying for a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths college from 1986 to 1989. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995.

Since the late 1980’s, Hirst has used a varied practise of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing to explore the complex relationship between art, life and death. Explaining: “Art’s about life and it can’t really be about anything else … there isn’t anything else,” Hirst’s work investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects th…