Shepard Fairey
Andre the Giant on a sticker, OBEY on a wall, and Hope on every lamp post in 2008.
Shepard Fairey was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1970 and made his first sticker at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989 — a wrestler's face captioned Andre the Giant Has a Posse — as an experiment in what happens when an image with no meaning is repeated enough. It became OBEY, and then a clothing label, a design studio and a body of prints and murals in a Soviet-poster red, black and cream. The Hope portrait of Barack Obama in 2008 became the defining image of that campaign, and produced a long copyright action with the Associated Press that Fairey settled after admitting he had destroyed evidence.
The print output is very large and is where nearly all trading happens: screenprints on paper and on wood panel, in editions from around eighty to several thousand, often in multiple colourways, with regular timed online releases. Edition size, release, colourway and whether a sheet is signed and dated in pencil are what set the value, and the spread between them is wide. Hand-painted multiples and unique collages on canvas sit above the prints. Unsigned open editions and merchandise are frequently listed as limited work.
If you own a work by Shepard Fairey
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.