Damien Hirst

This rare poster was produced for the Damien Hirst Solo Exhibition at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in 2005. The poster features a detail of 'Mother and Child (Divided)'  which was originally created in 1993.

Mother and Child Divided is a floor-based sculpture comprising four glass-walled tanks, containing the two halves of a cow and calf, each bisected and preserved in formaldehyde solution. The tanks are installed in pairs, the two halves of the calf in front of the two halves of the mother, with sufficient space between each pair that a visitor may walk between them and view the animals’ insides. Thick white frames surround and support the tanks, setting in brilliant relief the transparent turquoise of the formaldehyde solution in which the carcasses are immersed. The sculpture was created for exhibition at the 1993 Venice Biennale and was subsequently the focal point of the 1995 Turner Prize at Tate Britain (then The Tate Gallery), the year that Hirst won the prize. It is now in the collection of the Astrup Fernley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. Hirst created Tate’s copy for exhibition in the Turner Prize Restrospective at Tate Britain in 2007.

One of a group of works collectively entitled Natural History, Mother and Child Divided follows Hirst’s most famous work, created in 1991 for the British collector Charles Saatchi, a tiger shark floating in a giant formaldehyde-filled tank, entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Somebody Living.