Damien Hirst Formaldehyde Works Draw Scrutiny over Backdating

Three formaldehyde works by Damien Hirst dated to the 1990s were actually created in 2017,The Guardianreports.Respectively featuring a dove captured mid-flight, a trisected shark, and a pair of calves, the trio of sculptures—Dove, 1999;Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded, 1993–99; andCain and Abel, 1994—made their public debut at Gagosian Hong Kong in a 2017 exhibition of the artist’s works “from the early to mid-1990s.” The fact that none of the sculptures had ever been seen before aroused suspicion, andThe Guardianlaunched an investigation, which culminated in the discovery that the works had been made by Hirst’s staff in Dudbridge, England, in 2017.

Queried by the British daily as to the dating discrepancy, Hirst’s company, Science Ltd, responded, “Formaldehyde works are conceptual artworks and the date Damien Hirst assigns to them is the date of the conception of the work. He has been clear over the years when asked what is important in conceptual art; it is not the physical making of the object or the renewal of its parts, but rather the intention and the idea behind the artwork.”

Hirst’s lawyers further defended the artist, asserting that “the dating of artworks, and particularly conceptual artworks, is not controlled by any industry standard,” and further noting that “artists are perfectly entitled to be (and often are) inconsistent in their dating of works.” Gagosian, too, disputed the suggestion that the discrepancy was misleading “on the same grounds laid out in the responses from Science (UK) Ltd.”

Complicating the arguments laid out by the abovementioned entities in support of the dating is the fact that Hirst, in a 2017 interview with the South China Morning Post pegged to the works’ Gagosian Hong Kong debut, commented, “I prefer them now to when I made them,” though whether his estimation of the works had improved over a span of days or decades cannot be known for certain.

As to the works’ whereabouts, Dove is thought to have been sold, while the other two sculptures were exhibited in galleries and institutions across Europe and the US in the intervening years. Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded is currently on view at the Munich Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art. All three recall Hirst’s glory years as a member of the so-called Young British Artists, or YBAs, who rose to fame in the 1990s. The calf work, in particular, suggests his 1995 Turner Prize–winning sculpture Mother and Child Divided, 1993, while the shark puts one in mind of his 1991 sculpture The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which similarly preserves a specimen of the toothy predator.