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Shepard Fairey & Damien Hirst — Where There's Smoke

Where There's Smoke

2025

Where There's Smoke is one of the most symbolically charged works in the Triple Trouble collection, bringing Shepard Fairey and Damien Hirst into direct creative dialogue through the deceptively simple but loaded medium of household gloss and spray paint on canvas. The materials themselves are a statement: household gloss is Hirst's signature domestic-industrial medium, stripped of fine-art pretension, while spray paint is the foundational tool of street art, tying Fairey's world to the urban vernacular. The title's proverb — 'where there's smoke, there's fire' — implies concealed danger, scandal, or truth lurking beneath a visible surface, a theme that resonates deeply with both artists' careers built on provocation and cultural disruption. The collaboration forces a collision of Hirst's cool, systemic formalism with Fairey's agitprop graphic energy, producing a work that is neither wholly one nor the other but something genuinely hybrid and confrontational. As a 2025 piece, it feels like a deliberate culmination — two artists with decades of controversy between them making visible the smoke that has always surrounded their respective practices.

Medium
Household gloss and spray paint on canvas
Dimensions

Notes

Triple collaboration: Shepard Fairey x Damien Hirst x Invader

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About this work

Shepard Fairey & Damien Hirst, Where There's Smoke, 2025

Where There's Smoke is one of the most symbolically charged works in the Triple Trouble collection, bringing Shepard Fairey and Damien Hirst into direct creative dialogue through the deceptively simple but loaded medium of household gloss and spray paint on canvas. The materials themselves are a statement: household gloss is Hirst's signature domestic-industrial medium, stripped of fine-art pretension, while spray paint is the foundational tool of street art, tying Fairey's world to the urban vernacular. The title's proverb — 'where there's smoke, there's fire' — implies concealed danger, scandal, or truth lurking beneath a visible surface, a theme that resonates deeply with both artists' careers built on provocation and cultural disruption. The collaboration forces a collision of Hirst's cool, systemic formalism with Fairey's agitprop graphic energy, producing a work that is neither wholly one nor the other but something genuinely hybrid and confrontational. As a 2025 piece, it feels like a deliberate culmination — two artists with decades of controversy between them making visible the smoke that has always surrounded their respective practices.

Medium
Household gloss and spray paint on canvas
Dimensions
160 x 221 cm
Year
2025
Seen at
HENI, London, United Kingdom

Related themes

Geometric, Living Artist, Blue Chip, Street Art, Bold Colors, Vibrant, Mixed Media, Spray Paint, Collaborative, 2020s, American Artist, Pop Art, Urban Aesthetic, Urban, Portrait, Graphic, Colorful, Painting, Figurative, Pixel Art, Contemporary

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Collected by

Alex Capecelatro, Hamilton Selway Gallery