“I can’t understand why some people believe completely in medicine but not in art, without questioning either.”(Damien Hirst, 1991)

Throughout the course of Damien Hirst’s career, belief has been at the heart of his work. Early medicine cabinets such as God, 1989, pitched an unquestioning belief in scientific rationalism – the conviction that pills can cure you – against the more subjective belief in religion and the redemptive healing power of God. This equation gave form to Hirst’s disappointment that a belief in art did not exist in a similar manner to the way that God or science might be unquestionably believed in. Without this belief in art, any sense of meaning is dissipated; it being through the artifice of art and its formal structures that the illusions of life can be recognised.