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Shepard Fairey & Damien Hirst — Kiss Me Deadly

Kiss Me Deadly

2025

Kiss Me Deadly stands as the crown jewel of the Triple Trouble collaboration, merging Shepard Fairey's graphic street-art sensibility with Damien Hirst's most iconic and unsettling aesthetic vocabulary. The work is constructed using household gloss and spray paint alongside scalpel blades embedded directly into or applied onto the canvas, a visceral material choice that channels Hirst's long-standing fascination with mortality, medicine, and the beautiful grotesque. Fairey's bold, propaganda-inflected compositional style collides with Hirst's clinical yet seductive use of sharp objects, creating a tension between desire and danger that the title — borrowed from the classic noir film — amplifies perfectly. The phrase 'Kiss Me Deadly' evokes Cold War paranoia, femme fatales, and hidden catastrophe beneath a glamorous surface, themes that resonate across both artists' bodies of work. Together, the piece asks whether beauty and destruction are truly separable, making it a defining statement of the entire collaboration.

Medium
Household gloss, spray paint and scalpel blades on canvas
Dimensions

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Shepard Fairey & Damien Hirst, Kiss Me Deadly, 2025

Kiss Me Deadly stands as the crown jewel of the Triple Trouble collaboration, merging Shepard Fairey's graphic street-art sensibility with Damien Hirst's most iconic and unsettling aesthetic vocabulary. The work is constructed using household gloss and spray paint alongside scalpel blades embedded directly into or applied onto the canvas, a visceral material choice that channels Hirst's long-standing fascination with mortality, medicine, and the beautiful grotesque. Fairey's bold, propaganda-inflected compositional style collides with Hirst's clinical yet seductive use of sharp objects, creating a tension between desire and danger that the title — borrowed from the classic noir film — amplifies perfectly. The phrase 'Kiss Me Deadly' evokes Cold War paranoia, femme fatales, and hidden catastrophe beneath a glamorous surface, themes that resonate across both artists' bodies of work. Together, the piece asks whether beauty and destruction are truly separable, making it a defining statement of the entire collaboration.

Medium
Household gloss, spray paint and scalpel blades on canvas
Dimensions
260 x 183 cm
Year
2025
Seen at
HENI, London, United Kingdom

Related themes

High Low Art, Urban Energy, American Pop Art, Provocative Content, Street Art Style, Bold Graphics, 2020s Era, Mixed Media Painting, Confrontational Mood, Vibrant Colors

More works by Shepard Fairey

Collected by

Alex Capecelatro, Hamilton Selway Gallery