A key figure in the Young British Artists (YBAs) movement in late 1980s and early ’90s Britain, Damien Hirst uses an unashamedly direct visual aesthetic to comment on the transience of life and the futility of wealth.

Inspired by Hirst’s site-specific installation Pharmacy 1992, a life-sized replica of a working British pharmacy, the Pharmacy matchbooks draw on the artist’s interest in medicine as a powerful belief system that offers an antidote to mortality. The images that appear on the front of the matchbooks — the QAGOMA Research Library holds a boxed set of 60 — include visual and typographical references to pharmacology, such as blood filled vials, pills and medical instruments. Bringing attention to the commercial pursuit of science – to offer a remedy for death and decay – Hirst juxtaposes these images with physical matches, igniting a sense of tension in the work.