The Physical Impossibility

Damien Hirst's 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (1991) is a 4.3-metre tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde inside a steel-and-glass tank — one of the most iconic and scandalous works of the Young British Artists (yBa) generation. Commissioned by Charles Saatchi and later sold in a heavily publicised 2004 transaction, the piece has travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and stands as the emblematic object of the contemporary-art market's 1990s–2000s transformation.