Review: ‘DOMINION’ at the Hirst-owned Newport Street Gallery

Damien Hirst’s talent for making money comes, in part, from covering all the angles. Knowing the market, managing the multiples and exploring all commercial possibilities. Eliminate the middleman and maximize control. After cutting out galleries, agents and their fees from a two-day auction of his artwork at Sotheby’s in London in 2008, for example, Hirst walked off with a reported $198m. According to the 2022 book of the same name, his NFT trend-tapping project, “The Currency,” grossed him a cool $89 million. His most recent solo exhibition—2024’s “The Light That Shines”—was built around a brand partnership with self-styled futuristic wine producer, Château La Coste, and included a lucrative spin-off merchandise range, Hirst-designed wine bottles and new versions of his top-selling butterfly paintings.

Hirst’s artworks are now blue chip additions, the term ordinarily reserved for surefire stock exchange investments in companies like McDonalds and Coca-Cola. But how does such an individual spend their cash? Cleverly, that’s how. There’s Hirst’s property portfolio (that the Sunday Times reported in 2020 was worth around $190 million) wherein Hirst buys—and sells—prime location mansion houses and land, from London’s most fashionable districts to Millionaire’s Mile in Phuket, Thailand. And, of course, there’s Hirst’s art collection.

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If anyone knows the monetary value of art, it’s Damien Hirst, and the new “DOMINION” exhibition at the Hirst-owned Newport Street Gallery in South London that’s showing a portion of his collection is as much a study in canny investment as it is a portfolio of important art. What’s more, Dominion is curated by Hirst’s son, Connor. It’s Hirst’s collection exhibited at Hirst’s gallery and curated by a Hirst. All angles covered, then.

The senior Hirst has always been open about his influences and supportive of his peers, and the collection reflects his interests (as well as the size of his bank balance). As a prime figure in the U.K.’s Young British Artists (YBA) movement in the late 1980s, Hirst’s early pieces were exhibited alongside other YBAs, and work by fellow YBA alumni is on show here. There are a few Gavin Turk pieces, a smattering of Sarah Lucas’ gnomic 3D and print works and a Tracey Emin neon text sculpture, My Heart is With You And I Love You Always Always Always. The junior Hirst has also selected Marcus Harvey’s Myra for the exhibition. Completed in 1995, this is a portrait of the infamous Myra Hindley who, along with her partner Ian Brady, murdered five children from around the Manchester area of England between 1963 and 1965. The thirteen-foot-high portrait was made using prints from casts of children’s hands and remains chilling.

Elsewhere, the two Francis Bacon paintings on the walls, Fury and Crucifixion, are small (at around three feet square each) but mighty. Banksy’s Madonna and Child, painted directly onto cardboard in 2003 when you could still buy his work for the same price as a decent domestic toaster, hangs opposite Haim Steinbach’s Painting With Rectangles #11 from 1971. There’s one of Warhol’s Electric Chair screenprints, a Jeff Koons photo (Girl with Dolphin and Monkey), plenty of Richard Princes, some Wes Langs, a stunning Zhang Haiying painting from his Anti-vice series that comments on the Chinese government’s efforts to crack down on the country’s sex industry and yet more Banksys. For added depth, Hirst junior has added two artifacts (a mummified Egyptian head and a Celtic skull impaled with an iron spike from around 400 BC) and A Landscape with Monks at Prayer from seventeenth-century Italian artist Alessandro Magnasco (date of completion unknown).

As for the curatorial approach, the temptation to theme the rooms has been resisted and none of the artworks are labeled. Naturally, this information gap leads to a kind of spontaneous piece of performance art. Clusters of visiting art fans and puzzled tourists pore over the exhibition pamphlet’s small print-plagued map, trying to work out stuff like just who made that neon light coffin in the middle of room number five—it’s another Sarah Lucas.

Such ultra-minimalism and lack of razzamatazz perhaps means more concentration is required than at the usual mixed group exhibition. But all the added pamphlet-poring means visitors really come to grips with the art in the rooms. They have to. Plus, the artworks are treated democratically, with nothing over-staged or singled out for attention. Even the one Damien Hirst original on display—a 1995 dot painting called Biotin-Propranolol Analog—is tucked away on the gallery’s top floor.

It’s also worth pointing out that the Newport Street Gallery is a stunner. Built under Hirst’s direction by starchitects Adam Caruso and Peter St John, the team behind the refurbishment of London’s Tate Britain gallery development, the building is an amalgamation of three Victorian studios where designers once built sets for London’s West End theatres. The year after it opened, the gallery won the 2016 RIBA Stirling Prize for the UK’s best new building and Damien Hirst has overseen the creation of a viewing space that hums with its purpose. This place was custom-built to be the perfect artwork backdrop—tall white walls, polished concrete floors and just enough natural light from the windows above to complement the in-gallery lighting rigs.

There are eighty pieces in “DOMINION” with not one dud among them. Plus, entrance to the exhibition is free. Hirst-related nepo quibbles and sharp business moves aside, this was never going to be a poor show.

“DOMINION” is on view at the Newport Street Gallery in London through September 1.