Damien Hirst

This poster features a detail of 'Away from the Flock, Divided'. Printed on the occasion of Damien Hirst's exhibition, Cornucopia, at Musée Océanographique de Monaco in April 2010.

Away from the Flock is a floor-based sculpture consisting of a glass-walled tank filled with formaldehyde solution in which a dead sheep is fixed so that it appears to be alive and caught in movement. Thick white frames surround and support the tank, setting in brilliant relief the transparent turquoise of the solution in which the sheep is immersed. Away from the Flock is unusual for a Hirst sculpture in that it exists in three versions, all created the same year, of which ARTIST ROOM’s is the third. The principal difference between the three versions is that the sheep in the first version has an entirely black head and its forelegs are raised further off the floor of the tank, so that it appears to be arrested mid-jump. The sheep in versions two and three are more similar in appearance and in pose; ARTIST ROOM’s sheep has less black on its head and a pinker tinge in the rest of its wool than the others.

Away from the Flock is one of a group of sculptures collectively entitled Natural History, that Hirst initiated in 1991 with what was to become one of his most famous works, a tiger shark floating in a giant formaldehyde-filled tank, entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Somebody Living.