After pulling in more than half a million visitors for his first museum retrospective in Asia, Damien Hirst isn’t quite finished with Seoul.
For Frieze Seoul 2026, Gagosian is bringing together four decades of Hirst — from the instantly recognisable Spot Paintings and Spin Paintings to medicine cabinets, pills, flowers, figurative painting and relics from the fictional shipwreck of Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable.
“It is interesting how Korea, with its distinct culture, has embraced my work,”
says Hirst.
“In the 1990s, people in the UK would recognize me and say, ‘Your work changed my life’ and I’m hearing the same in Korea today. It’s surprising but gratifying.”
Spanning four decades, Gagosian’s Frieze presentation will move between Hirst’s recurring preoccupations with beauty, belief, science, chance and death, while bringing several of the distinct visual languages he has developed over his career into the same space.
Among them will be examples of the Spot Paintings and Spin Paintings. The former use meticulously handmade compositions to mimic the precision and uniformity of mechanical production, while the latter surrender part of the process to chance, using a motorised apparatus to determine the movement of paint.
Imitation Gold (2016), from the Colour Space series, takes the language of the spots in a looser direction, replacing their regular grid with organically positioned elements in which no colour is repeated.
More recent work includes Garden of Fun and Games (2023), from The Secret Gardens Paintings, where flowers collide with splattered paint in a characteristically Hirst-like meeting of control and randomness.
The presentation will also reach back to The Shot Crow (2009), a triptych from Hirst’s Blue Paintings. The series marked a significant return to painting for the artist in the late 2000s and an embrace of figurative imagery following several years away from the canvas.
Two closely connected works turn to another of Hirst’s longstanding subjects: medicine and our attempts to keep death at bay. Nemesis (2007), a medicine cabinet sculpture, will be shown alongside Twenty One Pills (2008), from the Fact Paintings series. Both explore the collision between pharmaceuticals and faith, and Hirst’s idea that belief in science has, for many, assumed a role once occupied by religion.
Completing the presentation are The Severed Head of Medusa (2008) and Daisy (2019), works from Hirst’s elaborate Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable.
Presented as archaeological relics recovered from a fictional ancient shipwreck, the works belong to the sprawling invented mythology Hirst constructed around Treasures. Beneath the spectacle, however, are questions that have followed him throughout his career: where truth ends and fiction begins, the relationship between faith and fact, and how readily we believe the stories placed in front of us.
Following the response to his Seoul retrospective, the Frieze presentation offers a more concentrated encounter with Hirst — from spots and spins to pills, flowers and fictional antiquities.
Damien Hirst presented by Gagosian at Frieze Seoul 2026, Booth C10, 2nd–5th September 2026, COEX
About the artist
Damien Hirst is one of the most influential and provocative figures in contemporary British art, known for a practice that confronts the fundamental themes of life, death, beauty, belief and value. Working across sculpture, installation, painting and drawing, Hirst has spent more than three decades turning subjects that might otherwise inspire fear or discomfort—mortality, medicine, decay and the fragility of the body—into some of the most recognisable images in contemporary art.
Born in Bristol in 1965 and raised in Leeds, Hirst studied at Goldsmiths in London, where in 1988 he organised Freeze, the now legendary exhibition of his work alongside that of fellow students. The exhibition became closely associated with the emergence of the Young British Artists (YBAs), a generation that transformed the British art scene during the 1990s through an ambitious combination of conceptual art, spectacle, entrepreneurship and engagement with popular culture.
Death has remained Hirst’s most persistent subject. His Natural History works preserve animals including sharks, sheep and cows in formaldehyde-filled vitrines, turning specimens into sculptures poised somewhere between scientific display, religious relic and memento mori. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), featuring a tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde, became one of the defining artworks of the period. Elsewhere, medicine cabinets, pharmaceutical packaging and surgical instruments explore society’s faith in science and its attempts to control mortality.
Running alongside these works is Hirst’s fascination with beauty, repetition and chance. His Spot Paintings use apparently endless arrangements of coloured circles, while the Spin Paintings surrender part of the creative process to centrifugal force. Butterflies recur throughout his practice as symbols of beauty, transformation and the brevity of life, their brilliant colours sitting in deliberate tension with their physical fragility.
Hirst won the Turner Prize in 1995 and has since staged exhibitions and projects on an increasingly ambitious scale, from his major Tate Modern retrospective in 2012 to Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable in Venice in 2017, an elaborate fictional archaeological discovery that deliberately complicated distinctions between authenticity, history, myth and spectacle.
Few contemporary artists have generated as much debate around the relationship between art, money and the market. Hirst has often made that relationship part of the work itself, challenging conventional systems of production, authorship, collecting and selling while simultaneously operating at their highest levels. Behind the headlines and controversy, however, lies a remarkably consistent set of questions: how we deal with death, why we believe what we believe, what gives an object value and whether art can offer anything approaching permanence in the face of mortality.
