Hirst’s use of formaldehyde allows him to present visceral, often disturbing objects in a knowingly cool, clinical style, adapting formal devices identified with Minimalism to a meditation on life and death, fact and faith. The heavy frames of the sculptures’ tanks have been a feature of his work since the 1990s in artworks such as A Hundred Years and A Thousand Years (both 1990). Hirst’s vitrines are rooted in the fear of fragility, and in a consequent desire to isolate and protect. Yet ultimately, far from proposing formaldehyde as an effective medium for preserving objects and the ideas they convey, Hirst concludes that the very idea of preservation is futile in the face of inevitable death.