Damien Hirst Takes Over Château La Coste with Dazzling Exhibition

Nonetheless, the name of the artist exhibiting at Château La Coste this spring is still managing to cause a stir. Damien Hirst needs little introduction. “Since the late 1980s his prolific oeuvre has provoked awe, shock, insight and pleasure,” writes Ellen Mara De Wachter in the exhibition catalogue of the so-called enfant terrible of the Young British Artists who is still perhaps best known by his flamboyant formaldehyde shark (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991). 

In Provence, Hirst is the first artist to take over the entire estate, filling its five exhibition spaces and siting a string of outdoor sculptures across the grounds. “There’s not that many artists that could respond to that kind of scope, not only in terms of quantity of works, but also the variety,” says Daniel Kennedy, Château La Coste’s Art Center Manager, highlighting how exhibitors have to consider not only “the amazing landscape,” but also “the very different architecture of each pavilion”. 

The proposal grew organically over conversations between Hirst and estate owner Paddy McKillen—longtime friends who have also been plotting a permanent Hirst pavilion at Château La Coste. While the monumental bronze sculpture of a pair of hands will land sometime in the next few years, the current exhibition, titled The Light That Shines, is no less ambitious. A sense of spectacle prevails in the installation of around 90 artworks, ranging from major large-scale sculptures such as Temple (2008)—a 21-foot, three-ton bronze recreation of an anatomical male torso—to new paintings. 

Perhaps most iconic are the formaldehyde pieces. A substantial series of Hirst’s Natural History specimens—from a shark and a calf to a dove and a trio of ducks (created between 1997 and 2009)—are brought together in a scene that is both glorious and grotesque. Encased in the glassy Renzo Piano pavilion, the architecture evocatively echoes the glass vitrines, creating a total artwork that the viewer too becomes part of. 

Elsewhere, the focus is on previously unseen work. Shown in the more traditional setting of the Galerie Bastide are a suite of over-saturated Secret Garden Paintings, while the Old Wine Storehouse combines the colorfully flecked and spattered Cosmos Paintings with bronze Meteorites and Satellites—prop-like objects that tether the ethereal to a worldly theatricality. Hirst’s latest kaleidoscope of butterfly paintings (The Empresses, 2023), meanwhile, soars sublimely, suspended in mid-air in the precariously cantilevered Richard Rogers gallery. 

There’s also a pleasing symbiosis between Niemeyer’s curvy, water-surrounded gallery space and Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable—an extensive body of sculptural work, ten years in the making, first unveiled during the Venice Biennale in 2017. It is accompanied by an elaborate tale of how the “ancient treasures” were rescued from the ocean bed, told in the form of a faux video documentary with much irreverent humor.

Classical sculptural forms—from the female nude to Medusa and the Skull of a Cyclops—are awe-inspiringly wrought in bronze, gold and marble, and playfully interspersed with wetsuit-clad divers and Disney characters. A gleaming silver sculpture of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse, for instance, is tellingly titled The Collector with Friend (2015); it’s a riposte to the mechanics of the art world that also acknowledges Hirst’s place with it.

“There’s definitely a punk, anti-establishment element to it,” says Kennedy, adding that Hirst and McKillen “share that rebellious nature.” For while Château La Coste, with its five-star hotel (the more affordable Auberge La Coste also opens next month) and roster of restaurants, is as bougie as you’d expect, it’s also brilliantly bonkers. It’s like a folly-strewn Victorian estate, but made modern; where tramping around the cypresses, pines and ancient oaks leads you to Sophie Calle’s Dead End, a grave-like cache of visitors’ secrets, and into the pregnant belly of Prune Nourry’s recently added Mater Earth. And in this otherworldly wonderland, Hirst fits in perfectly. 

“Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” is on view at Château La Coste through June 23.