Hirst's fish in a chip shop may sell for £150,000

Maev Kennedy
Tuesday March 18, 2008
The Guardian


Fishy business ... the Damien Hirst artwork that has been hanging in a fish and chip shop. Photograph: Bonham's


A fish that escaped being battered, despite spending almost a decade inches from the deep fat fryer in a Leeds chippie, is to be sold - for up to £150,000.

A handful of customers at the Town Street fish and chip shop joked that the fish swimming in formaldehyde, sealed into a small glass tank, looked like a Damien Hirst. Fortunately art thieves never spotted that it really was a Damien Hirst - Darren Walker and his father couldn't afford to insure it.

"People just got used to seeing it there, nobody paid it much attention," Darren Walker, who has now graduated from the chip pan to working as a maintenance engineer, said. "It was pretty securely attached to the wall, so we reckoned you'd have to know what you were doing to get it off in a condition you could sell it." He added: "Besides, we knew that if it was stolen Damien would give us another one, he's that kind of guy."

Walker and his brother and sister were school friends of Hirst's younger brother Bradley, at Allerton Grange in Leeds. When they left Walker was working in his father's chippie, and his mate was at a loose end so he put in a good word and got him a job there too.

The artist's pickled animals were just beginning to make a big splash in cultural circles: the Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, aka the shark, was first shown at the Saatchi gallery in 1992.

In Leeds, when they saw publicity about another piece, Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purposes of Understanding - a whole shoal of fish each in its own small tank - they joked that their apprentice should get his brother to make something for the chip shop walls.

"Two weeks later our fish in formaldehyde arrived," Walker recalled. "At the time I remember thinking that must be at least £5,000 there."

That was in 1994: the scales shone even more brightly the following year when Hirst won the Turner Prize, and the Walkers boasted that theirs was the only Damien Hirst on public display north of London. As the artist's market price soared - passing £1m for his giant anatomical figure eight years ago and hitting £50m last year for his diamond encrusted skull - the chip shop closed after a new landlord's rent hike.

The fish swam on to the wall of Walker's lounge, until the day when, desperate to move with his wife and children, he realised it was now worth most of the price of a new house in Leeds. "I'll be sorry to see it go," he said, "but it wasn't really appropriate for me to have it at home. I hope it can go to somewhere where more people can see it and enjoy it."

The fish will be auctioned - with the original crate with the stamp of Hirst's White Cube gallery - by Bonham's this autumn. Simon Mitchell, Bonham's regional director in Leeds, said: "the provenance is personal and impeccable. It's an amazing story about artistic generosity."