Holy Cows! Hirst has turned to religion...

There was a time when Damien Hirst, the cocky first man of BritArt, acted as if he were God. Now, he appears to have gone one step further and actually found Him.

In Hirst's first solo exhibition of new work in London for eight years, his archetypal obsessions with life, death and formaldehyde have found a new religious theme.

There may still be cows' heads suspended in glass cases, but they are now intended to evoke subjects such as the lives - and martyrdoms - of the 12 disciples and the biblical beginnings of man, with Adam and Eve.

The four evangelists - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - are commemorated in another work and further references to the frailty of man emerge in a series of paintings compiled from dead flies, each named after a deadly disease.

As the once notorious hellraiser has given up alcohol and drugs to concentrate on his art and his family, advance word on the new exhibition at the White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square, east London, smacked of a Damien Hirst conversion.

Jay Jopling, his art dealer, said the new work placed Hirst firmly in the tradition of the Old Masters, for whom religious themes were bread and butter. "He's very familiar with the history of art," he said.

Butterflies have a tough time of it as Hirst returns to an earlier theme by using thousands of wings in paintings with titles such as Hope.

Three-quarters of the works in the exhibition, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, have sold before it opens to the public tomorrow.