Since emerging on the international art scene in the late 1980s, Damien Hirst (b. 1965) has created installations, sculptures, paintings, and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art and beauty, religion and science, and life and death. From serialized paintings of multicolored spots to animals preserved in tanks of formaldehyde, his work challenges contemporary belief systems, tracing the uncertainties that lie at the heart of human experience. In Wretched War – The Dream Is Dead (2007), Hirst presents a silver variation of his Wretched War sculpture—first produced in bronze in 2004 as part of his Gold, Silver, and Bronze series—which depicts a headless pregnant woman standing astride a thin rectangular plinth, her skull at her feet and her skin splayed to expose her anatomy.