I made it down yesterday. Some nice pieces, really liked Jeff koons reflective balloon.

There are actually 50 of the limited edition print portfolio's according to the piece of paper i picked up yesterday.
The Banksy on the wall was an AP 2/29 and looked like it had blood on it.
The 23 prints were on 410 gsm Somerset Tub paper 420 x297.
only available up to xmas, (had better starrt saving).

There was also a more reasonable £38 Exhibition catalougue with a picture of Grim Reaper Banksy Tattoo on the cover.
Also a double sided poster of the same Tattoo for a bargain £25 (not).
They also had copies of the Spank The Monkey book which i also picked up at £20, preferred that the Hirst book.

I did actually take two pics befoere i was asked not to. Will get them up tomorrow when i'm on broadband.

Recomended :-)

Someones gonna have that Lenin away if they don't move it

news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2013313.ece

Murderme: Hirst's £100m art collection on view
By Arifa Akbar
Published: 25 November 2006

A new exhibition featuring a luminous coffin, a collage of topless models, coloured skulls and a series of Hoovers will showcase Damien Hirst's private art collection and reveal something of his influences and inspirations.

The Serpentine Gallery's show, In The Darkest Hour There May Be Light, which opens today, displays more than 60 pieces from the artist's "murderme" collection. It is the first time the public has glimpsed the assembled works. It features contemporary classics by Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jeff Koons, as well as a host of works by young British artists. Iconic works include Bacon's A Study for a Figure at the Base of a Crucifixion, four works by Koons, including hanging Hoovers and a giant yellow installation called Moon, several works by the graffiti artist Banksy and three Warhol silkscreens.

The items comprise just a fraction of Hirst's collection - estimated to be worth £100m - and he hopes to display the full array in a dedicated museum at his Toddington Manor country house in Gloucestershire.

Hirst began selecting the works of 24 artists to feature in the exhibition a year ago and has curated the show himself. Michael Joo, a New York artist who has four installations in the exhibition, said it would give an insight into Hirst's mind.

"If you look at it, you get an insight into Damien and what moves him. It's an opportunity to get a peek," he said.

Hirst is known to be an obsessive collector and began accumulating works by exchanging art with his friends. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of exhibitions at the gallery, said Hirst had championed emerging artists by buying their work. In an interview with Obrist, Hirst explained how he often bought works "for personal reasons or friendships" but also to support emerging names. "It seems really simple to me: if you like their work and they need money, rather than loan them the money, you buy a piece," said Hirst at the time. He added that when he first started out, he was supported by a number of artists himself.

It is not the first time Hirst has displayed works at the Serpentine. In 1994, he curated Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away ...

The exhibition, which is sponsored by Hiscox, runs until 28 January 2007.

A new exhibition featuring a luminous coffin, a collage of topless models, coloured skulls and a series of Hoovers will showcase Damien Hirst's private art collection and reveal something of his influences and inspirations.

The Serpentine Gallery's show, In The Darkest Hour There May Be Light, which opens today, displays more than 60 pieces from the artist's "murderme" collection. It is the first time the public has glimpsed the assembled works. It features contemporary classics by Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jeff Koons, as well as a host of works by young British artists. Iconic works include Bacon's A Study for a Figure at the Base of a Crucifixion, four works by Koons, including hanging Hoovers and a giant yellow installation called Moon, several works by the graffiti artist Banksy and three Warhol silkscreens.

The items comprise just a fraction of Hirst's collection - estimated to be worth £100m - and he hopes to display the full array in a dedicated museum at his Toddington Manor country house in Gloucestershire.

Hirst began selecting the works of 24 artists to feature in the exhibition a year ago and has curated the show himself. Michael Joo, a New York artist who has four installations in the exhibition, said it would give an insight into Hirst's mind.
"If you look at it, you get an insight into Damien and what moves him. It's an opportunity to get a peek," he said.

Hirst is known to be an obsessive collector and began accumulating works by exchanging art with his friends. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of exhibitions at the gallery, said Hirst had championed emerging artists by buying their work. In an interview with Obrist, Hirst explained how he often bought works "for personal reasons or friendships" but also to support emerging names. "It seems really simple to me: if you like their work and they need money, rather than loan them the money, you buy a piece," said Hirst at the time. He added that when he first started out, he was supported by a number of artists himself.

It is not the first time Hirst has displayed works at the Serpentine. In 1994, he curated Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away ...

The exhibition, which is sponsored by Hiscox, runs until 28 January 2007.
Also in this section

www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/11/28/bahirst128.xml

The monster we're lucky to have
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 28/11/2006

An exhibition of Damien Hirst's private collection shows just how infuriating and inspirational he is, says Richard Dorment

In pictures: Damien Hirst's murderme collection

When someone once asked Andy Warhol why he had papered a large gallery at the Whitney Museum with garishly coloured wallpaper patterned with the head of a cow, he replied that he wanted New Yorkers to be able to stand at the entrance to the show, look into the gallery, and be able to say truthfully that they'd seen the Warhol exhibition. The same could (almost) be said about the Serpentine's show of Damien Hirst's private collection.

Damien Hirst with Sarah Lucas's neon coffin
Hirst has a taste for the macabre, but also for art that is hard and shallow, dirty-minded, and kind of fun. As addicts say of a line of cocaine, you take it in fast and it leaves you feeling empty. While you are in the galleries, you have a good time, but the minute you leave you don't quite know where you've been. The whole thing is like one of the American artist Richard Prince's paintings of one-line jokes: you look, you smile, you move on.

I say that as if it's an entirely bad thing, but, in fact, some of the best artists in the show intended their works to be seen and understood in an instant. The highlight for me was the inclusion of guerrilla artist Banksy, whose work I really love, especially when he intervenes in public spaces. (At the bottom of our street, a monumental cast of a chimpanzee in the pose of Rodin's Thinker appeared overnight and was there for a couple of weeks. It was a sad day for the neighbourhood when the council removed it.)

The paintings by Banksy in Hirst's collection are terrific. One shows the famous photo of the naked Vietnamese girl burned by napalm screaming in terror as Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald take her by the hands, presumably on a tour of Disneyland.

This is political art at its absolute best – shocking, witty, angry and effective. And Banksy's painting of Whistlejacket ridden by Death dressed as a smiley-faced traffic cop drips scorn on British cultural and political authority.

I'm also a fan of American sculptor Michael Joo, whose work I hadn't seen in years. Despite the officious young woman whose entire job at the Serpentine is to tell visitors not to touch it, you really must touch Joo's hyper-realistic statue showing the skeletal corpse of a polar explorer – because unless you do, you won't realise that he's expired on the real ice of a refrigeration unit, not on Styrofoam.

The difference is crucial because it's the mad conviction, the lengths Joo goes to achieve his effects, that make his surrealistic sculptures touching – as well as ghastly and funny.

Then there are the old masters. There is a small but powerful Warhol silkscreen from 1963 showing the aftermath of a grisly car crash, and a superb Warhol still life from the little-known Knives series from 1981-82.

Hirst is the proud owner of a Francis Bacon, a study in oil and pastel for one of the Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. It's OK – but not a patch on the Bacons shown at the Gagosian Gallery alongside Hirst's own work last summer.

I am a big fan of most of Jeff Koons's later sculptures but Moon, a giant green-yellow jelly mould mounted on the wall, doesn't do it for me. Ditto the entire oeuvre of American sculptor Haim Steinbach. And Richard Prince is the most overrated American artist of his generation.

Hirst does better with his own generation. He has a lusciously painted John Currin, an imaginary portrait of a young woman who poses against a rose bush with her eyes closed, her hand on one hip and her body swinging provocatively. Currin makes a chocolate-box image inexplicably creepy by infinitesimally enlarging her head, and by dressing her in a frock so prim that it contradicts her carefree body language.

As for British artists, Angus Fairhurst looks a lot better here than when he showed alongside Hirst at Tate Britain a few years ago.

In his 1996 parody of a pietà, he photographs himself as a Christ-like figure cradled by a gorilla, a self-portrait of the artist as Jekyll and Hyde, or perhaps as Beauty and the Beast. On the lawn outside the Serpentine his bronze sculpture of a gorilla whose arm has been cut off is the only work of art I've ever seen that deals with bewilderment, the sense that appalling things happen that we are incapable of understanding.

Sarah Lucas shows a neon coffin and a life-like statue of a horse carting a couple of giant marrows. At least they represent a departure from the infinite tedium of her sculptures made of cigarettes.

Glaswegian artist Jim Lambie's delight in materials, shapes and colours transforms banal and simple things into objects of bedazzlement.

Hirst owns a wall relief made of sections of glossily painted doors joined together to make a cubist sculpture that I would never tire of looking at. In the central rotunda Lambie shows three oversized plastic statues of birds – objects found in a junk shop, then enlarged and decorated with psychedelic colours, bits of glass, collage, hoola-hoops, and glossy black paint.

As for artists whose work I didn't know before, South African sculptor Steven Gregory decorates human skulls with lapis lazuli, beadwork opal, malachite and tiger's eyes to create objects that are in equal measure horrific and beautiful. It's not particularly original, but the execution is extraordinary.

I'm very attached to the idea that art can be anything at all – except to be without visual interest. That's why the work of Angela Bulloch, Rachel Howard, Tom Ormond and Laurence Owen each, in their different ways, left me cold.

On the other hand, take the time to read Sean Landers's confessional text painting and you will find yourself completely caught up in the strange, Borges-like story of erotic obsession that its unreliable narrator tells.

Finally, let me say a word about the ringmaster, Mr Hirst, and the catalogue that accompanies the show. If, like me, you assumed that at some point he would discuss the reasons he admires and collects these artists, dream on.

For connoisseurs of the celebrity interview, Hirst's with Serpentine curator Hans Ulrich Obrist is a classic of the genre. Never for one sentence does our Damien stray from the all-important subject of himself and his work, unless it be to tell us how much f***ing money he has, how much he paid for the s*** he owns, or how much the whole f***ing collection is worth.

He has become one of the great British monsters. And alas, we are lucky to have him.

'In the darkest hour there may be light: Works from Damien Hirst's murderme collection' is at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2 (020 7298 1501), until Jan 28.

thats a real collab then?

do you have a link to it? couldn't find it

so clever

browse.sothebys.com/?q=banksy

fantastic!!!

It's a noted as "defaced Hirst" - not so sure they worked together. I think Banksy might have just painted on a "found" Hirst the way he painted on the Crude Oils.

Only a matter of time before Damien starts to cut rats in half and put them in a case instead of doing it to cows sheep and sharks!

He's just taking a cheap jab at Hirst. Nothing substantial in this, sorry.

Anyone know how long this has been kicking around for ( the maid with spots that is ! ) ? i never seen it before !!! reminds me of a little piece called patty Hirst ' !!



LOL ...

Yes there is a financial tie existing between the two but who cares? It's a great image and a great idea. They both get something out of it. Banksy gets more pr and interest in the art world because of Hirst's profile and Hirst gets to look cool because of Banksy's art!