DAMIEN HIRST, the bad boy turned global brand of British art, is set to sell £180m of work from his latest exhibition, easily a world record for a sale by any artist.

Hirst has already sold £130m of exhibits from the show in London, which has just closed, and is expected soon to clinch a deal – at the asking price – for his £50m diamond-stud-ded skull.

Although the artist will have to give about 25% in commission to his gallery, White Cube, this still leaves Hirst with about £135m. This will more than double his fortune, put at £130m in the Sunday Times Rich List.

The £10m cost of the jewels and fees paid to craftsmen for assembling the work – called For the Love of God – are expected to be partially offset with HM Revenue and Customs as tax-de-ductible expenses.

The sale of works at the two White Cube galleries in the West End and east London seals the transformation of Hirst over little more than five years into the art world’s biggest living cash generator. The most expensive work already sold by Hirst, 42, at the exhibition is the £10m Death Explained, a shark split in two. This just beats the

previous record of £9.6m paid for a Hirst work, a pill cabinet named Lullaby Spring, sold at Sotheby’s in London last month.

The next most expensive purchase from the White Cube sale was £6m paid for God Alone Knows, which incorporates three crucified sheep. As with Death Explained, the buyer has not been disclosed. However, the third most expensive work sold, Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain, was bought by George Michael and Kenny Goss, his boyfriend, for £3.5m. The work shows a cow pierced with arrows.

Even some of Hirst’s photo paintings of his wife giving birth have sold for as much as £2m each. They entail little work for the artist, because they are images blown up and then coloured in.

There were predictions that the skull, which is a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with more than 8,500 jewels, might be bought by somebody in the Middle East or one of the many Russian collectors who are now a powerful force in the art market. But it is understood some of the most serious bidders, of whom there have so far been five, are American or British. One is now on the verge of buying.

Frontrunners are said to include Nat Rothschild, a hedge-fund operator and son of Lord Rothschild, the financier and arts patron. Nat Rothschild just lost out last month in an attempt to buy Hirst’s Lullaby Spring.

Other rumoured bidders include the Americans Adam Lin-demann, a New York financier; Steve Cohen, who paid £7m in 2004 for Hirst’s shark in a tank; Adam Sender, another Hirst collector; and Eli Broad, who made his fortune in property.

Tim Marlow, exhibitions director at White Cube, said attempts were being made to ensure the skull would not vanish from public view. “We are trying to negotiate a deal with a museum or several museums so whoever buys the jewelled skull puts it on public display, at least initially, rather than simply keeping it at home or in a vault away from the public gaze,” he said.

The skull attracted long queues outside White Cube over the five weeks it was on show. Hirst has hinted he would like it to be displayed at the British Museum. He recently said he had partly been inspired by the Mask of Tezcatlipoca, an Aztec skull from the 15th or 16th century at the museum.

This weekend the museum, which is planning a £100m extension, said it was in principle interested in displaying the skull but would have to fit it into a suitable exhibition.

Hirst, who rose to fame in the 1990s under the patronage of Charles Saatchi with his pickled cows, sharks and sheep, will soon be the world’s most expensive living artist. Among those he has overtaken are Lucian Freud, the British portrait painter whose work has fetched nearly £5m.

The only artists whose works have sold for more than £50m are all dead – Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt.

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