Damien Hirst, Tate Modern, review Take a few minutes to look closely at the goggle-eyed fish arranged in neat rows facing the same direction in 'Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding. To me it looks as though death caught each one by surprise. They look startled to find themselves in a state of eternal non-existence, having reached the final destination that still awaits you and me. Unlike in Goya's still lifes with fish and game, in Hirst's vitrines the extinction of life elicits neither outrage nor pity. What there is, I think, is something akin to compassion. For me, by far the most touching of the animal pieces is 'Away from the Flock," a lamb captured by death in mid-frolic. With such an emotive image Hirst could easily have thrown us a crumb of comfort. Instead he makes it plain that death is not a state of eternal rest or endless sleep - it is eternal suspension in nothingness. Hirst explores the theme of death from another angle in the assemblages in which he breeds flies and butterflies, allows them to gorge on blood, sugar and flowers, and then steps back to watch them die - either by flapping aimlessly around for their short life span or by flying into an insect-o-cutor. In these cruel, nihilistic pieces, he imagines a God who gives life gratuitously, only to take it mindlessly away. Such works are much more ambiguous and far more resistant to simplistic interpretation than they at first appear. Hirst's incredulity at the idea of a god who could allow pointless suffering is balanced by what I perceive as his longing to find some purpose, order or perhaps even redemption in our lives. For most of his career he has been dealing with how we live with this ambivalence, how we deal with the knowledge of our mortality. The many pieces involving ashtrays full of cigarette butts in his show speak of state of endless waiting - for escape, for change, for death, or for consolation. Such works are thematically paired with medicine cabinets in which formalised arrangements of bottles, boxes and bags testify to the innumerable pains that afflict our bodies and minds and the lengths we go to keep death at bay. The gallery-sized installation 'Pharmacy" adds another dimension to Hirst's obsessive quest to wrest some meaning out of life. The white-on-white vitrines filled with drugs, the colourful apothecary jars sitting on a white counter in front of white chairs all feel ethereal, a glimpse of heaven, a secular church with a cross in green neon that symbolises hope. More than once as I walked through the show I thought of the work of Caspar David Friedrich. From the modest scale of the earlier work the art becomes bigger, more colourful, and more excessive in every way. Giant rotating 'Spin" paintings and a multi-coloured plastic beach ball kept precariously in the air by a blower simply say in different forms what Hirst has been saying all along: life is fragile, a matter of chance, so you may as well have some fun while you can. What's missing from Hirst's relentlessly nihilistic view of life so far is any sense that there might be some cause or explanation for our human condition. This is why I see 'Mother and Child Divided" as one of the pivotal works of Hirst's career. In it, the carcasses of a calf and a cow are bisected laterally, and then placed in vitrines side by side. In my reading of the work, Hirst sees the origins of our identity as autonomous beings in the child's inevitable separation from the body of the mother, the cataclysmic event in every life that leaves us in a permanent state longing to be made whole again. As the show moves towards its close and Hirst's stratospheric financial success becomes more and more apparent, the imagery becomes almost apocalyptic. I began to think of Hirst's career as a sort of perverse pilgrim's progress, a weirdly inverted morality tale. For the Love of God," a life-size cast in platinum of a human skull covered in more than 8000 diamonds, reminds us that, even when Hirst makes something beautiful, death, beauty, and evil are all constant presences. Here, and in canvases in which thousands of butterfly wings are collaged into designs resembling a stained-glass window and a Buddhist mandala, Hirst gives his works titles that make it impossible to miss their spiritual content. The show closes on a note of possible redemption, with a vitrine containing a dove with outstretched wings. The exact opposite of everything the skull stands for, this is the dove of peace, the Holy Spirit, love itself. Remember as you walk through this show that what you see represents a mere fraction of what Hirst has done - major pieces like 'The Golden Calf," the 'Twelve Apostles," the paintings, and the bronzes are excluded. But even so Hirst has some sort of compulsion to repeat himself. When a piece works he either makes it again or makes it bigger and at Tate Modern I couldn't see the point of including so many of the medicine cabinets, spot paintings and ashtrays. In many ways this is a difficult show, but I left it with a sense of Hirst as an artist whose moral stature can no longer be questioned. From tomorrow until Sept 9