Flies and formaldehyde: Hirst's gifts to the Tate

Artist keeps his promise and donates four works from his personal collection

• Mark Brown, arts correspondent
• The Guardian,
• Friday December 14 2007
• Article history

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This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday December 14 2007 on p15 of the UK news and analysis section. It was last updated at 23:58 on December 13 2007.

It is not everyone's idea of a great Christmas present - a pickled cow, some dead flies, used cigarette ends and an arrangement of sea shells. But the Tate could not be happier, and yesterday revealed that the artist Damien Hirst had made his first ever donation to a museum.

After protracted talks, Hirst has donated four important pieces from his personal collection and the hope is that more will follow. Three years ago Hirst was one of 24 artists to pledge significant works as part of Tate's Building the Tate Collection campaign, and while artists such as Antony Gormley, Anthony Caro and Louise Bourgeois had already donated, Hirst had not.

The four works include a copy of Mother and Child, Divided (1993) - a cow and calf, each bisected, and displayed in tanks of formaldehyde - which he displayed at the Turner prize in 1995.

Also on its way to the Tate is The Acquired Inability to Escape (1991), displayed at Hirst's first ICA solo exhibition in London. It consists of a large glass display case containing, among other things, cigarettes, lighter, ashtray and stubs - for Hirst the cigarette is symbolic of luxury, danger and death.

Who is Afraid of the Dark (2002) is one of the first of Hirst's fly paintings, in which dead flies cover a canvas. The fourth work, Life Without You (1991), is an arrangement of sea shells on a desk.

Hirst said he had been in negotiations for a few years to make sure the Tate got the right works to represent him. "It means a lot to me to have works in the Tate. I would never have thought it possible when I was a student. Giving works from my collection is a small thing if it means millions of people get to see my work displayed in a great space."

The Tate, which struggles with a limited acquisitions budget in a dizzyingly expensive art market, was as delighted to receive as Hirst was to give. Its director, Nicholas Serota, called the donation "an astonishing gesture", which would transform the representation of Hirst's work in the Tate's collection.

The Tate said Hirst's donations are the first phase of gifts from the artist and they join works already owned by the Tate, including Hirst's Pharmacy (1992), a room-sized installation of medicine cabinets with packaged drugs.

Hirst is the most successful of the Young British Artists championed by collector Charles Saatchi in the 1990s. This year a diamond-encrusted skull he made was reportedly sold for £50m.