Damien Hirst, Fact Paintings and Sculptures, Gagosian King’s Cross: ‘Heavy handed and disingenuous’

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. open image in gallery Damien Hirst’s Self-Portrait as Surgeon Hot Love, a severed cow’s head dumped in the middle of the gallery in a pool of plastic blood, harks back to the visceral horror of Hirst’s breakthrough piece A Thousand Years – created in 1990 and still his most critically acclaimed work. Glass cases full of everyday drugs and medical textbooks showcase, the gallery tells us, Hirst’s “obsession with science and medicine”. But if you’re remotely familiar with Hirst’s art, you’ll already have seen large numbers of such works, and may be wondering what – beyond the endlessly reiterated assertion that he is obsessed with death and that medicine provides a way of holding its great finality back – this “obsession” amounts to? Large paintings of brilliantly coloured butterflies on brilliantly coloured flowers tell us little beyond the fact that Hirst likes butterflies – which I think we knew from all those “Kaleidoscope paintings” created from actual butterflies.