Damien Hirst and the Pursuit of Artistic Immortality
It All Begins Here
Damien Hirst has long been preoccupied with the fundamental human anxieties surrounding mortality, impermanence, and the desire to transcend death. From his notorious formaldehyde sculptures to his diamond-encrusted skull, death has remained not merely a subject within his practice, but a persistent conceptual framework through which he interrogates value, existence, and the limits of human permanence. Now, Hirst is taking this preoccupation one step further by proposing that his artistic practice could continue long after his own death.
Hirst has revealed plans for what he calls “posthumous paintings”—a body of work conceived to be produced decades, and potentially centuries, after his death. His ambitious proposal involves the creation of 200 notebooks, with each notebook corresponding to a successive year following his death. Collectors would acquire the rights to transform the ideas contained within these notebooks into physical artworks, with the resulting works authenticated and signed by Hirst’s descendants.
The concept introduces a provocative question: Can an artist continue to create after they are no longer alive?
For Hirst, the answer appears to be yes. His proposed system deliberately challenges conventional notions of authorship, originality, and artistic chronology. A work conceived during Hirst’s lifetime could theoretically be physically realized 100 or even 200 years after his death. In one example, Hirst has described an unrealized sculpture of a pig preserved in formaldehyde that he conceived in 1991. Under his proposed system, that sculpture could be produced more than a century after his death while retaining its conceptual date of 1991.
This distinction between conception and fabrication is particularly significant within Hirst’s practice. It suggests that the essence of an artwork may reside not exclusively in its physical manifestation, but in the intellectual conception that precedes it. In this sense, Hirst is transforming the traditional role of the artist: rather than being solely the individual who physically produces an object, he becomes the originator of an extensive artistic mythology capable of being perpetuated by others.
The proposal is also remarkably consistent with Hirst’s longstanding fascination with mortality. His practice has repeatedly confronted the inevitability of death while simultaneously attempting to preserve, commodify, and aestheticize it. His famous works involving animals suspended in formaldehyde transformed biological decay into objects of contemplation and commercial value. His For the Love of God, a platinum skull encrusted with thousands of diamonds, similarly juxtaposed death with extraordinary luxury.
In this context, Hirst’s posthumous-art project can be interpreted as another meditation on the impossibility of permanence. Rather than accepting the artist’s death as the definitive conclusion of his creative output, Hirst proposes an artistic legacy that could continue indefinitely. The artist dies, but the concept remains active.
There is also an intriguing contradiction at the heart of the project. Art has traditionally derived much of its cultural significance from the singular relationship between an artist, their lifetime, and the historical moment in which a work was created. Hirst’s proposal disrupts that chronology. It imagines a future in which artworks attributed to Hirst could emerge long after the cultural circumstances of his own era have disappeared.
Whether viewed as an ingenious conceptual experiment, an audacious extension of his artistic legacy, or a provocative commentary on the commodification of art, Hirst’s proposal is undeniably characteristic of his career. He has repeatedly blurred the boundaries between art and commerce, originality and reproduction, life and death, and now, perhaps most dramatically, between the living artist and the artist who exists only through legacy.
Ultimately, Hirst’s posthumous artworks raise a question far larger than whether art can be produced after an artist dies. They ask whether artistic identity itself can survive indefinitely through ideas, institutions, collectors, descendants, and objects yet to exist.
In attempting to design his own artistic afterlife, Damien Hirst is confronting the very subject that has defined much of his career: death—and the human desire to defeat it.