Gagosian Britannia Street, London
The artist’s progress from raw young punk to pretentious money-lover is on show in this collection of formaldehyde works. Even the shark is getting very shrunken around the mouth
Thirty years ago, when I walked into the Saatchi gallery in London, I saw something wildly liberating and compulsive: a huge tiger shark that seemed to swim forward through clear blue liquid, with just a sheet of glass between you and its jaws. But the shark you see on entering Damien Hirst’s survey of his formaldehyde creations is not the same work: it’s Jaws 2, or even Jaws 3, the one where the mother shark attacks an aquarium. It is called Death Denied and was made in 2008, a fresher version of the notoriously decaying original, titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. But even 14 years is a long time for a dead shark, and this one’s getting very shrunken around the mouth.
Any fear of those teeth – and the inevitable advance of death they symbolise – rapidly dissipates as you take in the progress of Hirst from raw young punk to pretentious money-lover. It is still possible to put on a strong exhibition of his early work, with its genuine sense of grabbing something from this short life, but what we see here instead is how his original desire to shock has become empty and artificial. Somewhere along the line he stopped feeling it.
