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Shepard Fairey & Damien Hirst — Beautiful Exploding Icon Star 2 Spin Roses Painting

Beautiful Exploding Icon Star 2 Spin Roses Painting

2025

Beautiful Exploding Icon Star 2 Spin Roses Painting is perhaps the most formally ambitious work in the collection, merging Hirst's celebrated spin painting technique with Shepard Fairey's bold, propaganda-inflected graphic language through a dual application of household gloss and spray paint on canvas. The centrifugal energy of Hirst's spin process — paint flung outward by rotation into mandala-like patterns — collides with Fairey's deliberately placed stencilled imagery, creating a work that is simultaneously uncontrolled and deeply intentional. Roses, a recurring motif in Fairey's work symbolising beauty, resistance, and duality, explode outward from the spin's vortex, imbuing the kinetic abstraction with iconographic weight. The title's breathless accumulation of descriptors reflects both artists' maximalist tendencies and their shared interest in the icon — religious, political, and commercial. Together, they produce a work that feels like a manifesto: gorgeous, chaotic, and impossible to ignore.

Medium
Household gloss and spray paint on canvas

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Shepard Fairey & Damien Hirst, Beautiful Exploding Icon Star 2 Spin Roses Painting, 2025

Beautiful Exploding Icon Star 2 Spin Roses Painting is perhaps the most formally ambitious work in the collection, merging Hirst's celebrated spin painting technique with Shepard Fairey's bold, propaganda-inflected graphic language through a dual application of household gloss and spray paint on canvas. The centrifugal energy of Hirst's spin process — paint flung outward by rotation into mandala-like patterns — collides with Fairey's deliberately placed stencilled imagery, creating a work that is simultaneously uncontrolled and deeply intentional. Roses, a recurring motif in Fairey's work symbolising beauty, resistance, and duality, explode outward from the spin's vortex, imbuing the kinetic abstraction with iconographic weight. The title's breathless accumulation of descriptors reflects both artists' maximalist tendencies and their shared interest in the icon — religious, political, and commercial. Together, they produce a work that feels like a manifesto: gorgeous, chaotic, and impossible to ignore.

Medium
Household gloss and spray paint on canvas
Year
2025
Seen at
HENI, London, United Kingdom

Related themes

Dynamic Composition, Collaborative Work, Floral Element, Street Art, Icon Imagery, American, Spray Paint, Fine Art, Contemporary, Canvas-based

More works by Shepard Fairey

Collected by

Alex Capecelatro, Hamilton Selway Gallery