A member of the Street Art movement, like Keith Haring or Banksy, Fairey shares his political and social criticism through interventions in the public space.
His emblematic portrait Hope of candidate Barack Obama is probably his most famous work.
First and foremost, Shepard Fairey began by creating his own icon in 1989. It is only then that he will develop the visual of his message around the idea of urban propaganda by drawing inspiration from the masters of iconography in this field: communist artists. But the story begins like this: to show a friend how to make a silkscreen, Shepard randomly grabs a small picture of André The Giant (a famous wrestler at the time) from a newspaper. He adds "Has A Posse" (has a bunch of friends) to the image of the photo and makes a silkscreen frame with this image. He was far from imagining that he was making one of the most famous icons of the 21st century at that time.
At first only the word GIANT is associated with André's figure, but in 1995, after seeing the film "They Live", the artist added OBEY to his visuals. In this low-budget John Carpenter film released in 1988, the hero discovers that we are governed by aliens who surround us with subliminal messages such as "Obey" or "Consume" on all advertising boards. The conjunction of the two words OBEY and GIANT is therefore essential in most of the artist's works.
From 1996, Shepard Fairey began to integrate the graphic tools of Russian constructivism or the typography of the American artist Barbara Kruger. Characters like Stalin, Lenin and Mao also appeared as dictators and guardian figures of communist propaganda.
On the artist side, it is of course Andy Warhol who inspires the most Shepard Fairey for two reasons: he is the one who democratizes art silkscreen printing and he is surely one of the most prolific artists in art history. It seems that with more than 1'000 visuals to his credit and all declined in very large numbers, Shepard Fairey has made the bet of quantity plus rarity. His artistic approach is often compared to that of Andy Warhol.
