
What is Above
2025
What is Above brings together the philosophical provocations of Shepard Fairey and Damien Hirst in a materially arresting work built from PVC tiles and pills on painted paper, a combination that immediately evokes both the clinical and the spiritual. Pills are among Hirst's most loaded symbols — shorthand for humanity's medicated relationship with mortality, hope, and control — while Fairey's graphic, propagandist sensibility reframes them as objects of social and political power rather than purely personal vulnerability. The title, What is Above, gestures toward the Hermetic axiom 'as above, so below,' suggesting a mirrored correspondence between heavenly ideals and earthly pharmaceutical reality, asking whether salvation has been quietly outsourced to the medicine cabinet. Fairey's use of PVC tiles introduces a hard, industrialised texture that echoes both Invader's mosaic language and the sterile grids of pharmaceutical packaging, threading the collaboration's visual dialogue tightly. Together, the materials create a work that is simultaneously a devotional object and a critique of consumer faith in science and authority.
- Medium
- PVC tiles and pills on painted paper
- Dimensions
Notes
Triple collaboration: Shepard Fairey x Damien Hirst x Invader
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