Forms Without Life (1991)

Damien Hirst

fibreboard cabinet, melamine, wood, steel, glass and sea shells

Tate, London, Liverpool and St Ives

Classification:

Installation

Materials:

Wood, Steel, Glass, Fibre board, Melamine, Sea shell

Dimensions:

183 x 274.6 x 30.7 cm

Accession Number:

T06657

Credit:

Presented by the Contemporary Art Society, 1992

Scheme:

Historic Purchase by Purchaser (1914-2008)

Ownership history:

Purchased from Jay Jopling Fine Art, London by Penelope Govett for the Contemporary Art Society, November 1991; presented to Tate, June 1992

Relationship:

Penelope 'Penny' Connolly Govett Jay Jopling Fine Art, London Tate, London, Liverpool and St Ives

Forms Without Life (1991) is a vitrine with several shelves containing assorted shells which directly illustrates the dilemma of collection and display. Hirst was principally a conceptual and installation artist, whose pieces often related to life and death. He produced a series of 'cabinet' pieces in 1980s/90s in which ranges of objects were presented in the type of glass case that is typical of scientific display in a museum or laboratory, including such remnants as the packaging for pharmaceutical drugs and chemicals, empty drinking glasses, cows' internal organs and fish, they also evoke the 19th- century gentleman's hobby of collecting specimens. Here beautiful exotic shells, removed from their natural environment and which Hirst bought himself from souvenir stalls in Thailand, are available to the viewer for visual and elevated aesthetic appreciation but also inaccessible behind glass and serve as a reminder of the death of the organism that once inhabited them. As Hirst once commented: "you kill things to look at them’.

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