Damien Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965, and attended the Jacob Kramer College of Art, Leeds, 1983-4, then Goldsmiths’ College, 1986-9. His group show appearances included Whitworth Young Contemporaries, Manchester, 1987; Freeze, at PLA Building, 1988; New contemporaries, at ICA, 1989; and Modern Medicine and Gambler, both at Building One, 1990. In 1994 Hirst curated Stone Went Mad, Some Ran Away at the Serpentine Gallery, by which time he had become famous, in the words of critic Andrew Graham-Dixon, as the “virtuoso of dead animals and flies, the man who sold Charles Saatchi a tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde”, for the Saatchi collection.

Hirst’s winning entry for the Turner Prize, 1995, Mother and Child Divided, showed a cow and a calf bisected longitudinally and presented in a glass case. It was said to explore the themes of mortality and isolation. Hirst also exhibited two of his spot paintings, white canvases covered with a slightly irregular grid of coloured circles. In 1996 BBC 2 Television showed Hanging Around, a dark comedy written and directed by Hirst.