The British artist who created *The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living* is Damien Hirst.
Completed in 1991, the work consists of a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in a glass-and-steel tank. Its title turns the shark into more than a specimen: it confronts viewers with the difficulty of imagining their own death while remaining alive. The piece became one of the defining works of the Young British Artists movement.
Hirst made the work with funding from the London collector Charles Saatchi, who bought it and displayed it in the influential 1992 exhibition *Young British Artists III*. The shark later had to be replaced because the original deteriorated; Hirst used a new shark while retaining the original tank and formaldehyde presentation.
A common mix-up is confusing Hirst’s shark with his broader series of medicine-cabinet, animal, and preserved-animal works. Hirst is the artist, while the title refers specifically to this 1991 shark installation. The work’s nickname, “the shark,” is convenient but not its formal name.