Damien Hirst collection makes world debut at Bowes Museum , Teesdale Mercury

A COLLECTION of work by one of the world’s most renowned living artists will be making its world debut in Teesdale this autumn. 

In a departure from its more traditional exhibitions, The Bowes Museum has announced it will play host to the first-ever display dedicated solely to Damien Hirst’s screen-print work. 

The museum’s director, Adrian Jenkins, said: “With the recent redevelopment here, we want to shift the perception from the museum being the dusty old Bowes, to the shiny new Bowes.”

It is hoped the exhibition will bring people from across the world to Teesdale.

Mr Jenkins said: “The Bowes Museum would not necessarily be on the radar of the audience that would typically go and see this type of work. 

“And we don’t intend to do just Damien Hirst, we are looking to develop our contemporary art exhibitions further.”

Hirst became a household name in the early 1990s when he courted controversy with ‘Natural History’, a collection that famously featured dead animals suspended in formaldehyde.

But it will be a different Hirst that visitors to The Bowes will get to see up close. The exhibition, which will open in November, will include three of Hirst’s best-known print works loaned to The Bowes Museum from private collectors and other galleries. 

The include The Last Supper collection, which features prints that mimic the design of pharmaceutical packaging. Also on show will be Memento - The Souls on Jacob’s Ladder Tale Their first Flight, featuring images of butterflies, and the I Once Was What You Are, You Will Be What I Am skull series. 

Mr Jenkins, who has worked on securing the exhibition with Greville Worthington, an art collector who will curate the Hirst collection, said: “This will show the print production from the start of Hirst’s career to the present. 

“In terms of an exhibition this ranges from mass produced pop art to incredibly technical complex print production and I don’t think people are aware of how seriously he takes his print work.”

All three collections, like much of his other work, have one theme running through them – death. Mr Jenkins said the work was the artist’s reflection of his take on mortality. The Last Supper features huge prints of pharmaceutical packaging, which replaces drug names with those of everyday British café foods like beans and chips, or steak and kidney.

Mr Jenkins said: “It’s all very tongue-in-cheek.”

All works will be hung in the Temporary Exhibition Gallery, which will be specially decorated for Hirst’s arrival in Teesdale.

Mr Jenkins said: “These works will have been hung before in huge white spaces but we’re going to paint the gallery very dark blue, almost black, so they will really stand out.”

It has not yet been confirmed whether the bad boy of British Art will attend the exhibition but it has been given his blessing.