Xylene Cyanol Dye Solution
Condition reports and provenance available upon request
About This Work
Damien Hirst’s **_Xylene Cyanol Dye Solution_** distils the artist’s enduring fascination with colour, chemistry, and the aesthetics of the laboratory. Employing a vivid dye associated with scientific imaging and separation processes, Hirst elevates a utilitarian substance into a field of saturated, optical intensity. The work’s clean presentation and chromatic clarity evoke pharmaceutical precision, aligning with his broader exploration of medicine, belief, and the systems we trust to explain life and mortality. Balancing conceptual rigor with sensuous visual impact, the piece positions pigment as both material and metaphor—an index of contemporary culture’s reliance on technological expertise. As contemporary art, it resonates with debates around authorship, spectacle, and the commodification of scientific promise.
About the Artist
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...
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Contemporary Art • Hampstead, London
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