Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun

"Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun"

A joint exhibition by Michael Joo and Damien Hirst

On view at Haunch of Venison, Berlin, “Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun?” is the first joint exhibition of Damien Hirst and Michael Joo, two artists whose often-controversial mediums (animals, a diamond-encrusted, platinum skull, urine) have offered convenient comparisons since the late 1980s.  This exhibition displays both new and canonical works in a manner that allows the works’ conceptual interests to flourish, despite—and in conversation with—their formal similarities.

Hirst and Joo began engaging nature in their distinct artistic languages early in their careers.  Hirst’s seminal Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1992) consists of a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde, while Michael Joo’s Salt Transfer Cycle (1993-95), a three-part video work, shows him swimming through MSG, crawling and running on biographically significant salt flats, and finally spending 13 days in a South Korean forest, awaiting an elk to become comfortable enough with Joo to be able to lick the salt from the artist’s body.

via Art Observed