Urban Artist: Shepard Fairey

by pmaxwell, 6 October 2008

Shepard Fairey will be a highlight of the Urban Art Walk in Williamsburg.
Click here for details.

Shepard's work will also be featured in the upcoming Saturday@Phillips Auction at Noon on October 25, 2008.

Shepard Fairey, Seen in Williamsburg, October 2008

By the early 1990s, the recently deceased and famed wrestler Andre “the Giant” Roussimoff was unexpectedly reincarnated as the “poster boy” for a new street art movement, joining the ranks of Chairman Mao, Marilyn Monroe and Mickey Mouse as one of the most identifiable faces in popular art.


Shepard Fairey, Seen in Williamsburg, October 2008

Only a few years earlier, an ambitious young illustration student named Shepard Fairey had put his budding printmaking skills to the test by launching a personal campaign defined by a written manifesto to distribute tens of thousands of paper and vinyl stickers with an image of the wrestler’s distinct visage beside the tag line “Andre the Giant has a Posse."

After a handful of arrests and the success of a vast mail-order operation, Fairey’s tireless efforts to promote his art and create awareness about the subliminal effects of advertising paid off, landing him exhibition space on nearly every signpost and skateboard across the major cities of the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and beyond.


Shepard Fairey, Seen in Williamsburg, October 2008

Fairey’s enterprise soon caught the eye of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), the copyright holders of the original image, who encouraged the artist to put his creative powers to better use. Around this time, facing a looming lawsuit and perhaps ready for something new, Fairey skillfully abstracted the realistic style of his appropriated portrait of Andre down to its basic graphic forms, framing the wrestler’s blank stare within an imposing star shape adjoined by the revised tag line “OBEY Giant." With the strict use of primary colors, bold typography and precise geometric composition, the sticker campaign (which had now expanded to various media such as screenprints, collaged stencil paintings, murals, and clothing) began to resemble something from a bygone era taken out of context. The limited color scheme and rigid aesthetic seemed to pronounce the final word on the Russian Constructivist school of the 1920s while dually reviving the silenced history of left-wing political protest posters for a new audience.

As a direct result of the OBEY Giant campaign, Shepard Fairey is today known as one of the most prolific and influential street artists of his generation and will be honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2009.

Work by Fairey in the Saturday@Phillips Tastemakers Auction:

Shepard Fairey, Progress, 2008
Lot383

Shepard Fairey, Rise Above HPM, 2006
Lot 387

Shepard Fairey, Old Obey, 1996
Lot 390