Object description:
In 1988 Hirst, still an art student at Goldsmiths College in London, organized the famous "Freeze" exhibition, which helped his generation of Young British Artists establish itself. From the beginning, his works have returned over and over to the notion of life and death as spectacular but transitory manifestations of an endless cycle. The life or death is distanced and placed within a glass display cabinet or large-scale enclosed cell. The cases double as sculptural objects and as echoes of museum vitrines. "I really love glass, a substance which is very solid, is dangerous, but transparent," states Hirst. "That idea of being able to see everything but not able to touch . . ."
She Wanted to Find . . . consists of a large glass cell divided into three equal sections. Two are filled with a woman's belongings thrown in frightful chaos all over the floor, a table, and a chair. The walls, floor, and objects are violently splattered with blood. The third section contains a single object - a woman's white coat, hanging on a laundry hanger. Its immaculate condition is in sharp contrast to the rest of the objects and might substitute for the "victim" and hint at her innocence. The only sign of life, a goldfish swimming in a small fishbowl, adds the factor of time: the crime whose destructive results we have witnessed must have happened only a short time ago.
This multilayered work draws its power from several narrative associations it arouses, all inflected by Hirst's preoccupation with decay, the transitory, and the duality of life and death. It can be compared to horror films, from early classics like Frankenstein to the more recent Silence of the Lambs.
