From the Cradle to the Grave Selected Drawings

"From the Cradle to the Grave" presents a key selection of drawings and sketches produced by the famed English artist and provocateur Damien Hirst over the past 15 years. For Hirst, drawing is a way of maintaining the flow of imagination, and he does it constantly. Ranging from raw, impulsive sketches to detailed and well-thought-out drawings, these works allow us to explore the artist's preoccupations and passions and his fascination with the ambiguity at the heart of human experience: the confusing relations between art and life, life and death, image and reality, communion and isolation. The drawings are complemented by a selection of thumbnail photographs of finished sculptures and paintings. Accompanying essays by well-known writers Annuska Shani and A. A. Gill help the reader make connections between the drawings and Hirst's other works of art. Exquisitely produced using a six-color printing process, "From the Cradle to the Grave" illuminates how Hirst's compelling drawings were conceived and shows us the vitality behind their creation.