
Icon Pixel (with Pills)
2025
Icon Pixel (with Pills) is among the most conceptually loaded works in the Triple Trouble collection, fusing Shepard Fairey's graphic icon-making with Damien Hirst's obsessive pharmaceutical imagery and Invader's pixel tile aesthetic into a single, confrontational object. The incorporation of actual pills alongside ceramic tiles and wood directly references Hirst's celebrated spot paintings and pill cabinet works, in which pharmaceutical objects become both memento mori and commentary on society's medicated condition. Fairey's contribution grounds the work in his tradition of image-as-icon, the idea that certain figures and symbols acquire an almost religious cultural authority through repetition and stylization, which the pixelated tile surface then fragments and democratizes in Invader's 8-bit visual language. The combination of ceramic and pharmaceutical materials creates an uneasy tactile reality, the handmade warmth of the tile work interrupted by the clinical mass-production of pills, staging a collision between the human and the synthetic. Together, the three artists produce a work that interrogates how icons are constructed, consumed, and ultimately commodified in contemporary culture, with the pills serving as a wry, unsettling reminder of mortality beneath the surface of all image-worship.
- Medium
- Ceramic tiles and pills on wood
- Dimensions
Notes
Triple collaboration: Shepard Fairey x Damien Hirst x Invader
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