Welcome to the Open Art Surgeon’s Damien Hirst Severed Skulls project.

Who is Damien Hirst? 

Thought to be the world’s wealthiest living artist, since emerging onto the international art scene in the late 1980s, Damien Hirst has created installations, sculptures, paintings and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art and beauty, religion and science, and life and death. 

From serialized paintings of multicolored spots to animal specimens preserved in tanks of formaldehyde and human skulls encrusted in diamonds, his work challenges contemporary belief systems, tracing the uncertainties that lie at the heart of human experience.

Now, through the wonder of Fractionalized Ownership, you can now have your very own little piece of an original Damien Hirst spin painting.

What does this mean?

We, the Open Art Surgeons have purchased an original 2009 Damien Hirst artwork in the shape of a human skull – a recurring theme in Hirst’s body of work. 

We will be carefully cutting some 90 miniature skulls out of this painting. Each skull will be a scaled-down version of the original. These will be approximately 50mm (2") high and they will be mounted on artboard. They can also optionally come framed and ready to hang.

 This project and others still in the planning stages will bring original art by the foremost contemporary artists into the realm of affordability for the many, not just the few.

Q. Has anything like this been done before? Will my reward increase in value?

A. A couple of years ago an American art collective cut out individual coloured spots from a Hirst screenprinted artwork and sold them singly.  Naturally, we can make no guarantees as to future values of these skulls but those coloured spots have recently been appearing on the resale market with an asking price some 10x the price they were sold at by the collective so who knows what might happen!

Q. Will backers get to choose the skull(s) that they'll be receiving?

A. No, that would be extremely difficult to arrange so skulls will be randomly allocated.