This survey of Damien Hirst's early works from his own archive proved to be really fascinating. His earliest works, found-object collages owing a debt to Schwitters, are a real revelation which gives clues as to how his oeuvre would develop. This exhibition (seen between lockdowns), is like a greatest hits show that charts the developments of the themes and ideas that would lead him to being the most successful British artists of his generation. Surprisingly most of the works here failed to sell at early exhibitions of his work, and are not for sale here either. There is much death here. The spectre of the Grim Reaper pervades nearly all works whether it be the carcasses of animals (sure to enrage animal rights activists), the notorious picture of Hirst with the severed head of a corpse in a mortuary, or death implied, in the endless vitrines of life-sustaining pills and medicines. Much of this early work retains its shock value. The freezer full of severed, skinned cows' heads seems both gruesome and gratuitous, A Hundred Years, situated at the end of the exhibition, is the masterpiece in which maggots hatch then feast on a decapitated cow's head only to die as flies littering the floor of the vitrines' chambers having flown into an Insect-o-cutor suspended above. A Hundred Years holds a macabre fascination which haunts the viewer long after they have left the exhibition. Although Hirst is not really a painter in the grand tradition of art and his hero Francis Bacon, the presence of the early Butterfly, Spin and Spot paintings, is really welcome, and provides a much needed addition of the human touch, and injection of colour in this exhibition. They alleviate the presence of the numerous cold, sterile, clinical vitrines of medical equipment. In a year that has seen the COVID-19 virus claim countless lives worldwide though, certain Hirst vitrine works here seem prescient. Waster, created in 1997, another large vitrine full of what looks like used PPE and disposable medical equipment, certainly with the luxury of hindsight, seems to comment on the crisis of this years' pandemic, the importance of the role of key workers in the NHS, and their battle with the government to get vital PPE to enable them to successfully protect themselves from the virus and do their jobs. Like or loathe Hirst and his art this is a really important exhibition. He has played the art world at its own game, creating a mythology around both himself and his work, iconic commodities that collectors and the art market adore.
