Damien Hirst: Nothing Is True But Everything Is Possible

MMCA Seoul presents a solo exhibition of Damien Hirst, Nothing Is True But Everything Is Possible. The exhibition surveys over four decades of the artist’s practice, examining the complex emotions and desires with which humans confront life and death.

From the moment they are born, humans carry an unexplainable anxiety and fear of extinction. Paradoxically, these conditions give rise to the desire for eternal life, belief in transcendental forces, blind faith in medicine and science, and obsessive impulses toward collection and control. Hirst directs his attention to the social structures that emerge from such human desires, suggesting that the values we often take for granted—religion, science, art, and even capital—are founded upon remarkably similar structural foundations. Though these systems are often regarded as absolute truths, they may not be entirely true, nor can they simply be dismissed as empty illusions. Faced with this realization, Hirst asks what humans should feel and how they should live.

Spanning installation, sculpture, and painting, the exhibition traces the development of Hirst’s key ideas through a series of thematic sections.

Section 1, With Every Question Comes a Doubt, focuses on the artist’s early works. Since emerging into the spotlight in his early twenties as both a curator and an artist, Hirst has steadily developed a distinct body of work that challenges established systems and fixed conventions. This section traces how the artistic concepts and formal approaches central to his practice first took shape.

Section 2, We Live in Time, presents large-scale installations employing monumental glass vitrines. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) expresses the paradox that humans instinctively fear death yet live without fully realizing their own mortality. Featuring a large shark suspended in a glass tank filled with formaldehyde, the work confronts viewers with the physical presence of death. A Thousand Years (1990), composed of a severed cow’s head, fly larvae, and an insect-o-cutor, visualizes the cycle of life and death in raw and uncompromising terms.

Section 3, The Luxury of Silence, introduces works that explore the complex relationships among science, religion, and art. Works using pills and medicine cabinets focus on the blind faith humans place in medicine, the desire for eternal life that underlies it, and the visual language that sustains such belief. Their pristine surfaces and meticulously ordered arrangements reflect humanity’s obsessive desire to control life and fate. A key work presented in this section is For the Love of God (2007), a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with diamonds, reflecting on humanity’s boundless desires and the transience of life.

The final section, presented in the MMCA Studio, recreates elements of Damien Hirst’s working studio in London. Unlike conventional galleries that present finished works, this space foregrounds the process of artistic creation, conveying the site where the artist’s ideas and actions accumulate. Several previously unseen paintings are displayed here, some in an unfinished state, as the canvases were transferred directly from the artist’s studio shortly before the exhibition opened. The artist’s tools and materials—including paintbrushes, paints, workwear, and objects appearing in the paintings—along with a playlist selected by Hirst, evoke the environment in which the works are conceived and produced.

Through Hirst’s work, the exhibition reconsiders systems of value and belief that shape contemporary life, posing fundamental questions about existence, mortality, and the conditions through which we understand the world.