Damien Hirst

Hirst's work is far more complicated than the initial thoughts generated upon first glance.  His preoccupations with the transitory nature of decay, love and religion create a rich undertow of allusions that defy any one overriding meaning in his works' multilayered readings.  The present work, a sculptural-installation of 1999, entitled Adam and Eve (Banished from the Garden), finds itself in a not so dissimilar vein, somewhere suspended between the long tradition of 'Expulsions' in religious art and today's forensic science of the human body.  Adam and Eve (Banished from the Garden) abounds in contradictions and the tensions of dualities, wherein lies Hirst's compellingly stark visual power.     

As in the most affecting of his works, Adam and Eve (Banished from the Garden) appears at once sensational and disturbing: two seemingly stiff bodies, sheathed in white sheets, are in the midst of autopsy.  Metal buckets hang below the drains in each steel gurney, and both draped corpses are littered with an array of intimidating medical apparatus and carnal dross, including: putrefied chicken bones and skin, two blue gloves, a spool of thread, tweezers, scissors and even two bone saws, a hammer and pick.  The visceral reactions suggested by this forensic scene are key to Hirst's enterprise, and his unique artistic sensibilities that command such wide attention are oddly linked to classic themes.  

In the Western tradition of the Fall of Man, the image of Adam and Eve as representations of doomed human nature has been thoroughly explored, from renderings by Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach through Michelangelo and Rubens.  The crux of the subject lies in the inevitable death of Adam and Eve, foreshadowed by the grimacing shame and guilt of both, as they are often portrayed, cast out by the archangel St. Michael, who guards the Gates.  Hirst, however, portrays the `Banishment' not during their literal expulsion, nor at their moment of death, but thereafter.  Indeed, both Adam and Eve, distinguished by faint anatomical features beneath the white sheets, are in a post-mortem state.

Hirst's confrontational manner seems to extend these effigies, presented head to head, a strange vitality. In this incarnation, the bones and skin scattered about the cold metal tables give the bodies their essence, form and tangibility. Hirst does not describe diligently what beauty is, but he transforms an organism and, like an ontological taxidermist, he retrieves its lost life.  This gruesome yet spiritual statement, conjuring up the notion of the soul, sweeps through the aseptic environment of glass and metal.  The idea of flight of the soul has precedence in his butterfly paintings, fashioned from dead butterfly wings, and when one observes even Hirst's corpses of sheep, most prepared in cross-sections, the most shocking effect is in their transformation.  From a tank filled with formaldehyde, rise elements with which one can identify: life that has been transgressed yet restored and religious symbols redefined.

In Hirst's exhibition, Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings, at the Gagosian Gallery in 2000, the clinical eye and forensic doctor observes, dissects, analyzes, and diagnoses, recalling Francis Bacon's ethos: 'the brutality of fact'.  Hirst echoes this in Adam and Eve (Banished from the Garden), enveloping and transforming the actuality of the world that undoubtedly lives on its multiplicity.