Artist Damien Hirst with the platnum and diamond skull.
Platinum and diamond skull by Damien Hirst to go on show in London
The notorious platinum and diamond skull created by controversial British artist Damien Hirst is to go on show at London's famous Tate Museum next year, in the first survey show devoted to the artist in the UK.
November 23, 2011
The notorious platinum and diamond skull created by controversial British artist Damien Hirst is to go on show at London's famous Tate Museum next year, in the first survey show devoted to the artist in the UK.
The work, For the Love of God, has recently attracted big audiences at museums in Florence and Amsterdam, but has not been seen in London since 2007 when it was sold to a consortium that included Hirst.
Hirst, 46, has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions in Naples and Monaco, but never the focus of a solo show in a British museum.
More than 70 pieces will be put on display at the Tate Modern from April to September next year.
The exhibition will mainly feature pieces from early in Hirst's career. It will include the pickled shark – The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living – and the picked cow and calf, Mother and Child Divided.
Also featured is A Thousand Years, consisting of a glass box containing flies, maggots, a cow's head and an Insect-O-Cutor. It was one of his earliest works to explore mortality via living creatures as the flies fed, reproduced and were killed.
A recent world tour for the diamond skull was cancelled because of fears it would look "inappropriate" in the current financial climate.
