She put the work in a museum, turned it into a book, and then, when she finished showing it, she put it in a box.

It was founded as an Augustinian priory and adjoined St Bartholomew’s Hospital of the same foundation. The artistic act of turning her heartbreak into something else felt definitely something, though I have no idea what. She has a knack for condensing the narratives of other and juxtaposing them alongside her own space. It’s almost uncool to say that you appreciate Damien Hirst, and there are a lot of things I don’t like about his work, particularly his use of butterflies.Among the eye-catching pieces was a sculpture of a saint with nothing but a fig leaf to protect his modesty. One of Hirst’s most exciting and darkest pieces I’ve ever seen is a short video where he – jolly and charismatic – explains the best way to shoot yourself in the head.

The book itself is also beautiful - grey cloth cover embossed with a telephone, red-tipped pages, a ribbon bookmark. I've had a couple of kidney stones where I would have used the adjective "exquisite" to describe the pain -- somehow it just fits the intense, highly focused pain. Stephen Smith, who presented Fig Leaf: The Biggest Cover-Up in History, wrote: "Nature's jockstrap remains an impressively elastic device, two millennia after it was first twanged into place.I left on October 25, not knowing that this date marked the beginning of a 92-day countdown to the end of a love affair—nothing unusual, but for me then the unhappiest moment of my whole life. Damien Hirst’s reputation for wild living and some of the gaudiness and crassness of some of his art (and crassness of some of the collectors who hoover it up) belies the fact that there is often quite a profound metaphysical question embedded in many of his works. This will be the artist’s second one-person exhibition with the gallery since Double Game, in February – March 2001. We filled it with memories we agreed to not make public, or rather, I agreed to not make public—there was no risk of him doing that. The spare color scheme throughout this beautiful little volume - reds, whites, black - reinforces the influence of the Far East.

As always, she kept everything from that journeyphotographs, ticket stubs, visas, and letterseach image rubber-stamped to mark the countdown to the fateful day of her heartbreak. This painting is in the tradition of Titian’s Poesies, the mythological paintings he did towards the end of his life. Initially, of course, a Catholic institution, it was reformed under Henry VIII, when the Priory was dissolved. Separately, she’s said, “I had the control to say, ‘Okay, I will stop being moved by this man, or stop being obsessed with him on Monday at five o’clock . Yet skin was often a magic ingredient, and so it’s not wholly outrageous to wonder whether or not there’s something esoteric about the familiar image of Bartholomew: the living man standing with all of his muscles and viscera exposed, holding his skin.A poignant visual record of the obsessive nature of failed love by a leading French contemporary artist. A man and a woman tell stories of ordinary and not-so-ordinary heart-break, each story accompanied by a single iconic image. The minimal text with its repetition gradually soothes the reader, like an ominous fairy tale recited to a child before sleep. If we want to read it as symbolic, we could say that the skin simply represents the outer part of the person; once you remove that and you expose yourself entirely to God (or to oneself), then certainly change takes place.

Then through her motif of repetition, she tells the story again and again until it's so worn out, she's almost sick of her suffering to the point where it's not suffering anymore. Of course, the morphine injection I received when I had my first encounter was also "exquisite" -- somehow the total annihilation of the pain and the ensuing dream-like sensation is almost worth the pain. Exquisite Pain was recently exhibited as part of ‘M’as-tu vue,’ a one-person exhibition which premiered at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in October 2003 and traveled to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), the Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin) and the Ludwig Forum für International Kunst (Aachen).But some of his art just really stand out as being emphatic and challenging and punchy and worthwhile. There is a sort of black humour in it, but also an acknowledgement that we humans are a species which is both life-loving and self-destructive, and somehow we managed to we both had the same time. Two sculptures from Ancient Greece were removed from an exhibition at the same Al Riwaq venue because of the nudity.