The violently disfigured animals in his earlier work make tragically eloquent not only the corporeal reality of death but also the sheer physical cruelty of the Crucifixion. So is New Religion an attempt to return a modern audience to the agony of the Passion, and to re-phrase, perhaps, Philip Larkin’s terror in the face of what death – that immovable, constant occurrence – might be?”Definitely,” agrees Hirst. A cross of cedar wood is stuffed with jewel-like pills; a child’s heart and skull are cast in solid silver, wrapped in barbed wire and pierced with needles and razor blades; a further pill is made of marble. There’s a bit of everything in it.”New Religion has all the byzantine luxury of religious art, but crossed with Hirst’s defining interest in the visual signage of pharmacology, as well as a touch of rockabilly-gothic. “It was just one print to start with,” explains Hirst, still with a broad Leeds accent. “Then I started thinking about all the paraphernalia that you have with religion, and the idea of new religions popping up all over the place.

New Religion – currently on show in Paul Stolper’s London gallery – functions like a fresco cycle, from the Creation to the Last Judgement, with the artist fusing Christian iconography with the modern faith in medicine. He talks with conviction and, you sense, an awareness of the legends that have been woven around his name. In another 20 years, perhaps, he’ll come across a bit like Bob Dylan – studying the growth of his own mythology with a mixture of weariness and amusement.We begin by talking about New Religion, a work which consolidates into a single, multi-layered statement the classic cocktail of his concerns: faith, God, death, love, fear and redemption – the roots of which appear to lie in his Catholic upbringing. The back garden where we talk is plain and untended – just an oblong of wiry grass and a terrace.In his appearance – middle-aged casual – Hirst is utterly approachable. Inside, Science is rather like an old fashioned publishing house which has been partially shop-fitted by Clinique: somewhat shabby around the edges, but punctuated by office areas of slick, dazzling white modernity. This is the nerve-centre of Hirst’s activities, staffed by what appears to be a frantically busy team of young women.

He lives on farm in Devon with his partner and their two sons and also owns a seafood cafe in nearby Ilfracombe.Having just completed one of the most ambitious, and potentially most important British print projects of the last 20 years – a series of 44 thematically interconnecting prints and ecumenical artefacts entitled New Religion – he has agreed to meet me for a rare interview at the London offices of Science, the company he set up to manage the near industrial scale of his business as an artist. Once legendary for his hard drinking and macho hell-raising, he is now a more reclusive figure, tirelessly productive as an artist and as a family man. And as the portrait of an artist as a young man, it was clearly the calling card of a contender intent on being remembered.Nearly 17 years later and Hirst – who was 40 in June – is a multi-millionaire artist. On the other it was simply laddish, filled with the kind of humour which later became associated with the Loaded generation.

But either way, the portrait caught you in its trap – in its compelling, ambiguous awfulness. It was an image which seemed to short-circuit the critical faculties. On the one hand, it was genuinely shocking: a terrible and terrifying statement about the brute reality of human mortality, somehow made even worse by Hirst’s impish, faintly medieval-looking grin. There was nothing particularly memorable about the caller. He had a broad Leeds accent and a good line in quirky back-chat But the photograph left a deep impression.