The Spontaneous Lovers

1990

Saatchi buys A Thousand Years

Charles Saatchi arrives at the second show in a green Rolls-Royce and, according to Freedman, stands astonished before Hirst’s first major “animal” installation, A Thousand Years — a glass case where maggots and flies feed on a rotting cow’s head — and then buys it. Other accounts date the work to 1991.

1990

The warehouse shows Modern Medicine and Gambler

Together with his friend Carl Freedman and Billee Sellman, Hirst curates two “warehouse” shows, Modern Medicine and Gambler, in a former Peek Freans biscuit factory in Bermondsey that they designate “Building One”. They also stage Michael Landy’s Market.

1991

Saatchi pays for the shark in formaldehyde

Saatchi offers to fund whatever work Hirst wants to make, and the result is a shark in formaldehyde. The 4.3 m tiger shark was caught in Australia by a commissioned fisherman at a cost of £6,000, and Saatchi paid £50,000 for the finished work.

1991

First solo exhibition, In and Out of Love

The show is organised by Tamara Chodzko (now Dial) in an unused shop on Woodstock Street in central London. Other accounts date an installation of this name to 1994.

1992

The first Young British Artists exhibition

The first Young British Artists exhibition opens at the Saatchi Gallery in North London; Hirst shows the shark The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and A Thousand Years.

1993

The Venice Biennale: Mother and Child Divided

His first major international recognition: a cow and a calf cut into sections and placed in separate tanks of formaldehyde.