Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst's wide-ranging practice has sought to challenge the boundaries between art, science and popular culture. The installation is an apparently functioning pharmacy, complete with counter and floor to ceiling cabinets holding preparations and drugs. Entering the space from behind the counter, we discover the pharmacy as if stumbling in from the storage room. The uneasy clinical and authoritative atmosphere that is created is heightened by the absence of the pharmacist. Pharmacy could be seen as a representation of the multiple range of philosophies, theories and belief systems available as a means of structuring and redeeming a life. It explores the unquestioning confidence that society places in modern medicine offering a critique on our reliance on medicine as a belief system that is fundamentally centered on death.