God Save the Queen: Damien Hirst & Sarah Lucas

Edward Ressle is delighted to present God Save the Queen, featuring British artists Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. This marks the first time these legendary Young British Artists are paired together in a two-person exhibition. Here, Lucas’ compulsive and unabashed creations perfectly complement the monumental extremes and mystifying limits of Hirst’s.

God Save the Queen illustrates Hirst and Lucas’ iconoclastic approaches to art and alternative ways of adopting medium and metaphor. These artists have highly influenced each other’s work since their early days in the Fine Arts Program at Goldsmiths, University of London as the founding members of the YBA. Upending the art world, the YBA movement challenged the norms of art-making and further revitalized the UK art scene with the revolutionary ‘Freeze’ exhibit, curated by Hirst himself, putting not only the up-and- coming artists on the map, but Britain as well.

Damien Hirst, regarded as one of the greatest artists of his generation, has permeated contemporary cultural consciousness. Highlighting his wide-ranging practices, this exhibition demonstrates Hirst’s uncompromising exploration on the boundaries between art, science, and popular culture – His aesthetic language comments on the fragility and magnanimity of existence. Sarah Lucas has even explained that, “I feel for someone as brilliant as him. So many people have followed in his wake. He’s a genius to me.”

Sarah Lucas has solidified herself as a subversive challenger of conventions by illustrating the casual misogyny of daily life. From soft sculptures in tights and wire to photography, the exhibition highlights Lucas’ practice with mixed media and commonly found objects— conveying the artist’s humorous, yet critical comments on diverse social topics. Her unapologetic examination of sexuality and gender has earned her attention and praise, even Hirst, a prominent collector of Lucas’ work, says that, “there’s just a freeness and simplicity...Sarah manages to make the everyday humorous.”

God Save the Queen brings together the works of Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas to exemplify their ground- breaking aesthetic and juxtaposes it with their relentless cultural investigation.

As an extension of God Save the Queen, Edward Ressle is pleased to present Damien Hirst’s Night Falls Fast, 2004, in the fourth edition of West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai from November 10 - 12, 2017. Hirst confronts the complexity of life and ventures into the realm of uncertainty in his fly painting series, pondering on the thought that, “Your whole life could be like points in space, like nearly nothing. If you stand back far enough you think people are just like flies, like the cycle of a fly is like your own life”.