“He popped into the Saatchi once to look at my work. They called me and said, 'Bacon's been in, he was here for about an hour.' I didn't really believe them but then here's this letter he wrote to Louis Le Brocquy, the Irish painter, where he says, 'I saw this Hirst !y piece and it really worked.' – Damien Hirst

Fabrik Contemporary Art is pleased to present the works of the most controversial and in!uential British artists of our generation: Damien Hirst, Francis Bacon, Gilbert and George, and Banksy.

This exhibition will show one of Damien Hirst’s photogravure etchings from a set called Memento that included 6 butter!y etchings, 6 skull etchings and a single diamond skull etching, emphasizing on Hirst’s obsession with life and death and having direct lineage with Warhol’s death and disaster series.

Francis Bacon, on the other hand was Hirst’s sole hero. Just before his death in 1992, Bacon saw and admired Hirst's A Thousand Years (1990), the chilling glass tank displaying an entire life cycle as !ies hatch, feed and rush to their deaths on an electronic !y catcher. Seeing it again, its bleak cruelty still stuns. For his part Hirst was, and is, clearly in awe of his great predecessor, a man whose obsession with !esh, decay and mortality was as intense as his own.

“Art for all” is the belief that underpins Gilbert & George’s art. Their trademark format is the large grid, a square or rectangular picture broken into sections that becomes a uni"ed "eld of signs and images. The artists’ art, which is sometimes seen as subversive, controversial, and provocative, considers the entire cosmology of human experience and explores such themes as faith and religion, sexuality, race and identity, urban life, terrorism, superstition, AIDS-related loss, aging, and death. "What we do is like automatic writing: we have no idea how we start," says George. "There is some confusion in our brain," says Gilbert. “We're like that. Because our pictures are not based on ideas or plans, but just come out from inside ourselves, we feel they must be right."

Similarly, Banksy, the notorious and satirical British street artist, challenges the world around him through a style of art that epitomizes resistance: gra#ti. Banksy uses the style of gra#ti in order to complement his visual medium with the ideas in which it represents: resistance, freedom, and tolerance. Ironically, Banksy’s work challenges the institution of art itself, and he uses this stance against our hierarchical culture to tackle other forms of repression, such as political and economic inequality. With humorous yet critically revealing images, Banksy has challenged many of the threatening phenomena that our world faces today, including cultural hierarchies, social homogenization, and repressive consumerism. Despite Banksy’s popular appeal, the artist remains largely anonymous.

The exhibition will include a unique photogravure piece by Damien Hirst and his latest unique spot etchings, and original and print works by Bacon. In addtion will be works on paper released for the Brooklyn Museum of Art by Gilbert and George, and Banksy.