The Last Supper, a suite of 13 screenprints, each measuring 152.5 x 101.5cms, from the British Council Collection. The prints mimick the graphic design of medicinal industry packaging, using colours reminiscent of Hirst’s ongoing Spot Painting series, inspired by commercial drug firm product catalogues.

 

In addition to the product number and dosage information, each typographically individual print has the drug name substituted for pedestrian British foods such as Beans, Chips and Cornish Pasty – initially perhaps creating associations with the artist himself and his forays into restaurant ownership, though it is doubtful that such foods would ever be served in Pharmacy.

 

The biographical theme is furthered through the familiar company trademarks being replaced with the artist’s own name or a stylised D+H logo – corporate and authoritative. This simple alteration immediately raises questions about the nature of belief in large corporations and to a degree, the blind faith inherent in contemporary society for pharmaceutical drugs to ease our pain and heal the body.

Parallels to the faith and commitment evident in religious belief are simply evoked through the appropriation of the conceptual structure of the Last Supper. 13 images representing the 13 participants at the meal, the title itself suggesting nutrition for the body and the spirit, coupled with decay and ultimately death – the ongoing theme of Hirst’s work.

 

The 13 prints form iconoclastic portraits of Christ and the twelve disciples through the pop art visual device of generic mass production and the commercial world.


Damien Hirst, Born in 1965 in Bristol, Hirst grew up in Leeds and came to prominence while still a student at Goldsmiths College when he masterminded the highly acclaimed group show Freeze (1988) and then Gambler (1990) and Modern Medicine (1990).  His work has been included in many group exhibitions, among them Young British Artists (Saatchi Gallery, 1992), Sensation (Royal Academy of Arts, 1997), as well as solo exhibitions, most recently Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings at the Gagosian Gallery, New York (2000). Hirst won the Turner Prize in 1995.

Incorporation With

British Council
BNH Hospital