Monday Inspiration ✨
Artist: Damien Hirst, Shepard Fairey and Invader
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When Damien Hirst glues medical waste to a canvas—syringes, latex gloves, pill bottles—and arranges them into an abstract butterfly, what do you call it?
The gallery says: “Medical waste and household gloss on canvas.”
But look at what’s actually happening. Appropriation of medical materials. Assemblage of fragments. Recontextualization of clinical waste into something poetic. This is collage—just not the kind you learned in school.
Hirst has been working this way for 40 years. Medicine cabinets filled with his grandmother’s prescriptions. Vitrines stuffed with medical waste. Pill grids that mimic pharmacy shelves. He appropriates pharmaceutical systems and transforms them into meditations on mortality.
He’s not calling it collage. But the methodology is identical: taking existing materials, ripping them from context, and reassembling them into new meaning.
This is The New Wave of Collage—artists working in collage mode without being bound by paper and scissors. Appropriation, recontextualization, resignification as a way of processing reality.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
“Hazardous Materials” is currently showing at Triple Trouble (Damien Hirst, Shepard Fairey, Invader) at Newport Street Gallery, London, until March 29, 2026.
Photo: Cless
Text: Max-o-matic
