Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon, a friend of Hirst’s and a major supporter of his work, has been a key influence on the artist’s practice. Hirst’s morbid fascination with gore and death, explored in the screen print series Til Death Do Us Part (2012), evokes Bacon’s controversial treatment of the body in his visceral figurative paintings.Works such as For The Love Of God recall Marcel Duchamp’s use of everyday objects to create works he dubbed ‘readymades’, a practice echoed by another of Hirst’s friends and contemporaries, Jeff Koons. The reproducibility of Hirst’s works, many of which are created by a team of assistants, are certainly inspired by the artistic practice and philosophy of American Pop Artist, Andy Warhol. Hirst cites little-known British artist John Hoyland as the catalyst for his long fascination with colour, characteristic of his Spot paintings.

Damien Hirst is no stranger to controversy. Well-known for his provocative and inflammatory works that deal explicitly with taboos such as death, Hirst has also been criticised for creating art which is both cruel and possibly dangerous. In a major retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery in 2012, Hirst recreated one of his 1991 installations, In And Out Of Love (White Paintings And Live Butterflies) (1991). Featuring a host of live butterflies, over 9000 were said to have died during the exhibition’s five month-long run. Hirst’s famous installation Two Fucking And Two Watching – made from a rotting cow and bull – was once banned from appearing at a New York exhibition for fear it would induce illness and vomiting amongst visitors.

After producing his first limited-edition print series, The Last Supper, in 1999, Damien Hirst has created numerous prints and editions that have dominated the market - with many selling for over 6 figures at Auction.

It is Hirst’s Spot prints, however, that remain his most popular and continually successful on the secondary market. Based on Hirst’s pharmaceutical paintings, the popularity of the Spots can perhaps be put down to their visual accessibility or the fact that he signs these works on the front, rather than the back, making them all the more recognisable. Similarly, the Hirst In a Spin series and Butterfly prints remain perennial favourites, with one of his Butterfly stained-glass prints selling for £150,000 in 2018 - currently the most expensive of Hirst’s prints to sell at auction.

The number of prints and editions produced in a series obviously affects their price and success on the secondary market, with the average Hirst series spanning between 50 - 150 alongside artist proofs. One of the key exceptions to this is found in his Butterfly Rainbow and Butterfly Heart prints, made to raise money for the NHS, which was released in 2020 in editions of up to 4,150.

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While Hirst had his heyday back in the ’90s and the 2000s, his work is still widely collected today. Thanks, partially, to the fact that, while some editions can sell for six-figure sums at auctions, others remain accessible to newer collectors.

Over the last ten years sale results for Hirst are dominated by works estimated under $10,000, suggesting that the market for his editions is stronger than ever, and more robust than even that of his original paintings. After some fluctuation during and following the COVID pandemic, Hirst's market increased steadily throughout 2022. In particular, the market for complete sets has has grown to 15% of the artist's total secondary print market, suggesting that there is a growing demand for full portfolios.