Damien Hirst formaldehyde animal works dated to 1990s were made in 2017
Three Damien Hirst sculptures that were made by preserving animals in formaldehyde were dated by his company to the 1990s even though they were made in 2017, an investigation by the Guardian has found.
The trio of works, made by preserving a dove, a shark and two calves, have in recent years been exhibited in galleries in Hong Kong, New York, Munich, London and Oxford as examples of works from the 1990s, his Turner prize-winning period.
However, all three were made by Hirst’s employees at a workshop in Dudbridge, Gloucestershire in 2017. The artworks first appeared at an exhibition at Gagosian’s Hong Kong art gallery that same year. The show, Visual Candy and
Natural History, was billed as an exhibition of the artist’s works “from the early to mid-1990s”.
Among the artworks on show were three formaldehyde sculptures that had never been seen in public before. They included Cain and Abel, 1994, which consisted of twin calves that appeared side-by-side in white boxes, and Dove, 1999, which featured a bird, wings outstretched as if in flight, set in a single liquid-filled acrylic box.
Hirst gave the third piece, a shark dissected into three pieces, the title Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded, 1993-1999. The same sculpture is on show at the Munich Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art.
The Guardian could find no mention anywhere of the works having existed, in any form, prior to 2017. Sources familiar with all three works said that, contrary to the impression given by the dates in their titles, the sculptures were less than a year old when they first appeared in Hong Kong.
Dove, 1999 is understood to have
been sold at or after the Hong Kong exhibition. The calves and dissected shark, however, have appeared in several public galleries and museums across the US and Europe, between 2018 and 2024. At every exhibition, they were displayed beside 1990s dates.
Dates attributed to artworks are widely understood to refer to the year they were completed. However, in response to questions from the Guardian, Hirst’s company Science Ltd said the date that the artist assigns to his formaldehyde works does not represent the date they were made.
It said: “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 later clarified that while using the date of conception in the title was the artist’s “usual approach” for formaldehyde works, he did sometimes use the date the sculptures were made. “The dating of artworks, and particularly conceptual artworks, is not controlled by any industry standard,” they said, adding: “Artists are perfectly entitled to be (and often are) inconsistent in their dating of works.”
That approach, however, appears at odds with industry norms in the art world. The Guardian consulted a range of art vendors, gallerists, academics and auction houses, including some who have in the past exhibited or sold Hirst’s works. All said the date assigned to a contemporary artwork ordinarily denoted the year it was physically created – not the year it was conceived.
The Gagosian Hong Kong exhibition where the dove, dissected shark and twin calves made their debut was a useful opportunity for Hirst to showcase his older works to a new market in east Asia. In an interview with the South China Morning Post to coincide with the 2017 exhibition, Hirst remarked: “I prefer them now to when I made them.” The same article observed some of the artworks were “showing their age”.
That may accord with a suggestion – denied by Hirst – that there was a concerted effort by his company to give the sculptures the appearance of artworks that had suffered from years of wear and tear. Sources told the Guardian that Science instructed employees to artificially age the sculptures, making them look as if they were made in the 1990s.
Lawyers for Hirst accepted that his works had on occasion “been made to look older or distressed”. But they said that any such steps were part of the “artistic process” and denied “any suggestion that employees of Science have ever been told to ‘physically age’ works of art in order to falsely represent that the works are older than in fact they are”.
Seemingly muddled remarks
While there appears to be broad consensus in the contemporary art world that dates given to artworks denote the year they were made, there are some caveats. For works created over time, or replicated after an initial edition, for example, artists sometimes use a hyphen or oblique to include a date range.
When Hirst displayed the dissected shark in Hong Kong, the title contained one such date range: Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded, 1993-1999. However, the date range Hirst used for the sculpture suggested the artwork was conceived in 1993, and completed in 1999, when it was, in fact, made in 2017.
Subsequent exhibitions, including the one currently showing the sculpture in Munich, dropped the reference to 1999 altogether.
More recently, Hirst made seemingly muddled remarks about the origins of Myth Explored, Explained, Explodedwhen he commented on them in an Instagram video in 2020, while it was on display at his Newport Street Gallery in London.
Wearing a grey beanie hat, Hirst walked around the pieces of shark, and described the piece as “an idea for a shark in 93 that I didn’t do until quite a few years later”. He added it was made at “a similar sort of time” to when he was cutting up the cow used in his famous formaldehyde sculpture Mother and Child Divided. That piece was created for the Venice Biennale in 1993.
Hirst said in the Instagram post that an exhibition in which the sculpture was appearing, entitled End of a Century, contained “many works I made in the 20th century, before the year 2000”. Hirst’s lawyers said it would be wrong to suggest that Hirst intended to mislead the public in his Instagram post.
Back in 2006, Hirst found himself at the centre of a different debate arising out of the need to refurbish or update formaldehyde pieces that are prone to decay. It related to the piece that made him famous: the formaldehyde shark The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), which had been bought by the US hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen for $8m.
Hirst offered to replace the 4-metre (14ft) tiger shark inside the tank, which had decomposed. Cohen agreed to pay for its replacement with a new tiger shark suspended in the old tank, igniting a debate about whether it could still be called the same work.
“It’s a big dilemma,’’ Hirst said at the time. “Artists and conservators have different opinions about what’s important, the original artwork or the original intention. I come from a conceptual art background, so I think it should be the intention. It’s the same piece. But the jury will be out for a long time to come.”
The three formaldehyde works made in 2017 before the Hong Kong exhibition, however, raise a very different set of questions around whether Hirst has been sufficiently transparent about the origins of the works. The dove, twin calves or dissected shark were not refurbished formaldehyde works, and neither were they official editions or reproductions of earlier works.
They have in recent years been presented in galleries around the world in a manner likely to lead the public to assume they were created in the 1990s. And it is possible that other Hirst formaldehyde works that have been dated to the 1990s were in fact made in subsequent decades.
Awkward questions
Any ambiguity over the origin of any of Hirst’s formaldehyde works is likely to raise awkward questions, including for the institutions that promote his work. There is no public list, or catalogue raisonné, of Hirst’s sculptural works, so galleries, auctioneers and museums rely on Science for details.
Hirst’s lawyers said galleries, museums and auction houses were typically provided with details of artworks “and are then provided with further information as and when required or raised in any ad hocqueries”. There are now likely to be questions around precisely what Hirst told galleries about the trio of works made in 2017.
In 2021 and 2022, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History displayed what it called “Damien Hirst’s famous Cain and Abel (1994) artwork” as part of Meat the Future, an exhibition about the production and consumption of animal products. Hirst posted a picture of the sculpture on display at the Oxford museum, with the title: Cain and Abel (1994).
A museum spokesperson said: “These dates were provided by Science Ltd, and the museum understood them to be the creation date of Cain and Abel as per artwork label convention. The museum reproduced them exactly as Science Ltd presented them, with the date in brackets, and Science Ltd signed off our artwork label before printing.”
Informed by the Guardian that the work was actually made in 2017, the spokesperson added: “We followed sector practice in adopting the date of creation as supplied by the artist and therefore did not mislead the public.”
The Gagosian, which hosted the 2017 Hong Kong exhibition and subsequently exhibited two of the same works in galleries in New York and London between 2018 and 2023, said: “Gagosian is transparent with its clients. We dispute your points on the same grounds laid out in the responses from Science (UK) Ltd.” The Newport Street Gallery did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, visitors to Munich’s Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (MUCA) are greeted with Hirst’s dissected shark in three tanks. The title, Myth Explored, Explained, Exploded,appears beside the date 1993. An MUCA spokesperson said: “The museum has worked directly with the artist Damien Hirst and his studio for this exhibition. As such, all artwork cataloguing details have been provided by the artist’s studio and displayed in accordance with the artist.”
.
don’t remember anything about it, at least nothing beyond a few tremors of deja vu.
There’s a not-very-simple explanation for all this. After the breakup, Clementine enlisted the services of a company called Lacuna, which offers clients a procedure to target and erase memories from the brain. When Joel discovers through mutual friends that Clementine had him erased, he does likewise, which triggers a hilariously analog session where technicians (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood) strap a colander-like device to his head and use an old computer to zap the affected areas while he’s unconscious. (When Joel asks Lacuna’s chief doctor, played by Tom Wilkinson, whether the procedure risks brain damage, he replies: “Well, technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage.”)
As the session goes on and he experiences the lost memories as a kind of agitated waking dream, Joel starts to rebel and whisks Clementine away to recesses of his mind where he thinks the technicians won’t find him. This gives Gondry license to create vivid scenes that darken and contort as his memories are scrubbed, like Polaroids developing in reverse. It also allows Carrey to retreat to his childlike comic persona at times while showing a more vulnerable side as an actor, as Joel finds himself clinging to Clementine despite whatever residual animosity he feels over their breakup. He doesn’t like the idea that he won’t remember her.
Eternal Sunshine doesn’t limit the comic friction to Joel and Clementine, either. There’s also a love triangle at Lacuna involving the young secretary (Kirsten Dunst) that creates its own kind of mess, a salty back-and-forth between two of Joel’s friends (David Cross and Jane Adams), and a creepy subplot where a Lacuna technician uses Joel’s file to hook up with Clementine. There’s not a single relationship in the film that seems settled and happy, which could be said of every relationship in a Charlie Kaufman project. And yet, Eternal Sunshine remains a deeply romantic film, because those fleeting moments of connection are magical and Kaufman has a secret appreciation for the mating habits of our flawed species.
There are many grace notes that make the film as indelible as the memories that Joel longs to keep: the delicate score by Jon Brion, who also collaborates with Beck on a gorgeous cover of the Korgis’ Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime, the off-season majesty of a frozen lake and a Long Island beach in winter, and Kaufman’s typically pungent dialogue, which zaps away sentiment like a Lacuna desktop. Eternal Sunshine celebrates the essential untidiness of love, the beautiful messes two people can make together. It’s a folly to think we’d want it any other way.
This article was amended on 19 March 2024. The company was incorrectly referred to as Lucuna rather than Lacuna
the centrality of the enslaver. Countless graves and cemeteries of the formerly enslaved are buried under interstate highways, shopping malls or car parks. Some African Americans travel to west Africa in search of a tangible connection with ancestors.
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit organisation that already runs the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, seeks to close this gap with the 17-acre site built for an estimated $12m to $15m. Visitors can arrive by boat on the same waters that once trafficked enslaved people, then step inside 170-year-old dwellings from cotton plantations as well as recreations of holding pens and railway carriages. They will hear trains running on nearby railway tracks built by enslaved hands.
Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the EJI, says in an interview: “We’ve done a poor job in America of reckoning with our history of slavery. There just aren’t places people can go and have an honest encounter with that history that centres on the lives of enslaved people. In Europe, what’s happened in Germany, in Berlin and other cities, has made Holocaust memorials and sites of remembrance such powerful places. When you go to the camps, it’s hard to avoid the power and the weight of that history.
“We’ve avoided confronting the weight of our history in ways that have undermined our ability to achieve the sort of progress and justice that many of us want. I do hope that people will come here and be sobered by the history but also inspired by the people who survived, endured, persevered and went on to commit to building an America that has so much potential.”
The river is the first artefact. Forming just north of Montgomery and flowing 318 miles, it was bordered by plantations and forced labour camps and traversed for decades by boats carrying 200 enslaved people at a time. To be trafficked south by steamship – in overcrowded conditions with little protection from the elements – was to be “sold down the river” .
One enslaved person forced to work on a river boat recalled: “A drove of slaves on a southern steamboat, bound for the cotton or sugar regions, is an occurrence so common, that no one, not even the passengers, appear to notice it, though they clank their chains at every step.”
Once disembarked, visitors follow a path through the sculpture park’s native elm, oak, sycamore, cottonwood and chinaberry trees and survey art in an evocative natural landscape. Eva Oertli and Beat Huber’s 2014 concrete sculpture, The Caring Hand, presents five giant fingers protruding from the earth around a tree as the river flows beyond.
It is one of several pieces – about half of which were specially commissioned – that achieve the monumentality the space demands. At the entrance, Simone Leigh’s Brick House is a 16ft-tall bronze bust of a Black woman without eyes and a torso combining the forms of a skirt and a clay house (previously seen along New York City’s High Line). The Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s bronze We Am Very Cold depicts several figures, including a child, contorted as if in a perpetual storm. David Tanych’s steel Free at Last is an 8ft-diameter ball with a giant chain and open shackle.
Kehinde Wiley’s An Archaeology of Silence stands 17.5ft high. Invoking the visual language of heroes and martyrs in European historical art, it depicts a shirtless man in jeans and sneakers draped limply over a regal horse, acknowledging the legacy of slavery in lynchings, police brutality and other violence against Black bodies – yet with a grace and vitality that hints at resurrection.
Brad Spencer’s From the Ground Up depicts a life-size man, woman and child made entirely of brick. An accompanying panel notes that the tiny fingerprints of enslaved children who turned bricks as they dried can be seen today on the bricks of historic buildings in Charleston, South Carolina. Visitors to the park can see and touch bricks made by enslaved people 175 years ago.
The park performs a further act of excavation. For more than three centuries enslavers often decided what enslaved people were called; the US Census recorded them only with a number. After the civil war, some 4 million newly freed Black people were able to formally record a surname in the 1870 census. All 122,000 of these surnames are inscribed on the National Monument to Freedom, a 43fttall, 150ft-long wall angled like an open book, its concrete clad with a bronzegold metal facade that changes with the light.
Stevenson, 64, a public interest lawyer revered for his work on prison reform and death row, comments: “The enduring truth about enslaved people was their capacity to love, to find and create family and relationships that allowed them to survive and endure and overcome the brutality and I think that should be celebrated.
“There’s a narrative of triumph that we need to acknowledge and the monument is a gesture toward that, as a physical space but also as a way of naming names, making personal, making human this history. For people who are descendants to come and see that name and have a tangible connection made to that legacy is important and necessary.”
There is no more fitting venue for the park than Montgomery, capital of Alabama (a state that Donald Trump won by 35 percentage points in 2020) and crucible of American contradictions. It has witnessed one of the most conspicuous slave trading communities in the nation but also an act of courage by Rosa Parks that ignited the civil rights movement (a statue of Parks marks the spot where in 1955 she boarded the bus where she would refuse to give up her seat to a white man).
On a six-acre rise overlooking the city, Stevenson built a memorial – comprising 800 corten steel monuments – to more than 4,400 Black people killed in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. But this is also a city where the Alabama state capitol (built by enslaved brickmakers and bricklayers) still features a heroic monument to the Confederacy, the breakaway southern states that fought to preserve slavery, and a statue of Jefferson Davis, inaugurated here as its first president in 1861.
Inside there are still portraits of the Confederate general Robert E Lee and Governor George Wallace, who declared in 1963: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Confederate banknotes are still displayed in the old treasurer’s office while eight murals inside the capitol dome still include “Secession and the Confederacy, Inauguration of President Jefferson Davis, 1861” and “Wealth and Leisure Produce the Golden Period of Antebellum Life in Alabama, 1840-1860”.
Last week, at the nearby First White House of the Confederacy, a tour guide could be heard enthusing to white tourists, “You’re on the Jefferson Davis trail!” as a Black woman entered wearing a Tshirt that said: “But still, like air, I’ll rise – Maya Angelou.”
Rarely is the American paradox felt so keenly. In the jarring juxtaposition of progressivism versus revanchism, of the beauty of Stevenson’s vision versus the mausoleums of white supremacy, how does he avoid a permanent sense of whiplash? “We’re in an era of transition,” he muses philosophically. “When I moved here in the 1980s, there were 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy and you couldn’t find the word slave, slavery or enslavement anywhere in the city landscape.
“It was a part of a history that no one acknowledged, let alone discussed, and we are still under the cloud of a historical narrative that is false and unhealthy about the greatness of ‘the lost cause’ where we romanticise this effort to preserve slavery and to maintain white supremacy. That has to be challenged and we’re going to have to move from that and you’re slowly beginning to see that.”
Until this year, Stevenson notes, the three biggest high schools in Montgomery, with student populations that are 98% Black, were named after Confederates – but not any more. “There is some sobering around this effort to celebrate people who did horrific things, just like it would be unconscionable to go to Germany and see Adolf Hitler statues or monuments to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
“We’ve got to reckon with the fact that we are glorifying people who were insurrectionist, tried to destroy this nation, represented a commitment to a racial order that was corrupt by this false idea that Black people are not as good as white people. With each year and each decade, we’re going to have to do more to get to a more honest space.
“That hasn’t happened in the way that it will need to happen in Alabama but it is happening. We are on that path and I don’t think that we can be a schizophrenic about history. History is history and we need to reckon with it and, when we reckon with it, we’ll find the courage to celebrate people – white people included – who did extraordinarily honourable things.”
Stevenson, author of the 2014 memoir Just Mercy, which became a 2019 film starring Michael B Jordan, likes to work on his historical projects covertly until they are ready to go public, thereby avoiding prejudgment by the unnerved, the resentful and the downright racist. You could call him a stealth truth bomber. The community then generally embraces his efforts, not least because they attract visitors who boost the local economy.
The Legacy Museum, which opened in 2018 and moved to a new, greatly expanded building on the site of a former cotton warehouse three years later, has few original artefacts but draws a compelling line from slavery to mass incarceration through narrative, interactive, newspaper excerpts, photos, statistics, videos, works of art and imagination. A haunting exhibit contains 800 jars of soil collected from lynching sites around the country as part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project.
Now it is the turn of the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park to make the intangible tangible. Bricks. Names. Elms, oaks, sycamores, cottonwoods and chinaberries. A river and a railway. Love in the midst of agony. Speaking in Montgomery in 1965, Martin Luther King observed: “The climactic conflicts always were fought and won on Alabama soil.”
Stevenson observes: “The existence and the emergence of these truth-telling spaces allows us to say, look, if we can do this in Montgomery, Alabama, there’s not another place in America that can say, ‘They did that in Montgomery but we couldn’t possibly do it here.’ That’s the power of this place collectively because we are steeped in that long history of denial and resistance to ending slavery, to ending lynching, to ending segregation. We have an opportunity to be on the other side of this movement to commit to truth that will give us a unique credibility and power.”
The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park opens in Montgomery, Alabama, on 27 March
the Dark is deeply tedious. The most immediate problem is the writing. The game aims for a snappy, noirish detachment, but simply can’t align it with the fundamental silliness of its Lovecraftian mystery. The abrupt switches of tone and location are more bewildering than intriguing. It also struggles to justify itself: why do its dual protagonists spend most of the game apart, despite Hartwood hiring Carnby specifically to protect her?
If Pieces Interactive hoped the star talent it hired might elevate the writing, the effect, unfortunately, is quite the opposite. Comer seems at a loss as to what Hartwood’s personality is; almost every line she delivers is tonally off. Simple filler phrases such as “I need the key” sound as if they’re coming from a sarcastic teenager. Harbour fares slightly better, although he often sounds like he’s reading the script with one eye on the clock.
It’s worth noting the Resident Evil games are hardly narrative masterpieces, either. But they are scary and exciting, qualities Alone in the Dark stumbles right past. Outside a few instances, combat and puzzling exist in separate realms, so exploring the mansion is devoid of tension. Even in the dreamscapes, monster encounters are surprisingly scarce. Shooting enemies when they do turn up can be fun, assuming they don’t stand jittering in a corner due to the game’s regular AI malfunctions, but most other interactions are either underwhelming or outright irritating. Melee combat is limp, while opening doors or climbing ladders is excruciatingly slow.
Moreover, for someone who is supposedly lost in the abyssal depths of madness, Jeremy’s dreamscapes are disappointingly ordinary. They include a Louisiana swamp, a graveyard, a warehouse, and a library (admittedly an ancient one). You visit a couple of more exotic locations later, but they’re too fleeting to make much impact. Listening to real people talk about their dreams is trying enough. If you’re going to force me to experience a fake person’s dreams, you better make sure they are profoundly odd.
After the excellent surrealist horror of Alan Wake 2, which revelled in its own strangeness while also delivering a clear, compelling story, Alone in the Dark is too staid, too clumsy, and too haphazard to invoke anything other than a shrug. The mystery surrounding Jeremy’s madness isn’t worth putting up with the ponderous unravelling, while the combat and puzzling are mere shadows of Resident Evil 2’s superior design. The curse, it seems, lives on.
Alone in the Dark is out 20 March; £46.99