This comprehensive monograph was produced to accompany the drawings retrospective Damien Hirst: Corpus: Drawings 1981-2006, held at Gagosian Gallery, New York in 2006. It features more than 200 drawings that offer a historical insight into rarely seen aspects of the artist’’s work and process. Included are early drawings from Hirst’’s student days; pencil sketches for seminal sculptures such as “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” “A Thousand Years,” “‘‘The Acquired Inability to Escape,” “Away from the Flock” and “The Hat Makes the Man”; preparatory diagrams for early spot paintings and medicine cabinets; a large-scale series of 14 drawings for The Stations of the Cross (2004); and proposals for unrealised and future projects. Accompanying the drawings is a conversation between the artist and political philosopher John Gray (author of Straw Dogs, False Dawn and Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern), and an essay by British historian Simon Baker.
