Damien Hirst has handed out a present on Christmas day—his own works in his words presented on his Instagram feed. The headline-hitting artist has launched a virtual tour of his End of a Century show which opened earlier this year at his Newport Street Gallery in south London.
Hirst writes on the social media platform: “In the exhibition are many works I made in the 20th century, before the year 2000. Unfortunately due to Covid, I’ve had to close the gallery twice now and many people who’d booked tickets to see it might not get the chance. So I’ve decided to go through the gallery talking about the works one by one and made a video about each piece in the show and I’m gonna release them all over the next few weeks. It’s like a walk round of the show.” The first work Damien discusses is Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded (1993), one of the artist’s celebrated installations comprising animals suspended in formaldehyde.
The work consists of a small shark cut into three, its body parts displayed in separate vitrines. “I loved those three words, Explored, Explained, Exploded—you get an exploded diagram if you buy a chair from Ikea,” Hirst says. “I really love the idea that you can take something apart and present it in its element like a diagram. I love that kind of way of cutting—it’s violent, killing things to look at them…. In science there’s been a lot of death and horror in order to understand the world we live in… it seems really ridiculous that you create death in order to understand life, so this piece was about that.”