373 - OBEY.

OBEY. “Target Exceptions,” 2024. Offset lithograph on Cream Speckle Tone paper. Signed and dated. Measurements: 91 x 61 cm. Frank Shepard Fairey, OBEY, is an American street artist and graphic designer, famous for the iconic “Hope” poster used by Barack Obama during his presidential campaign. His designs draw on elements of mid-20th-century political propaganda posters. Featuring slogans such as “Think and create, print and destroy,” which blend the subversive with the entertaining, his themes and aesthetics often strike a balance between caricature and a revival of political propaganda, Situationist ideas, and the aesthetic-philosophical revolutions of the 1960s—thematic undercurrents that were very common in art from the late 1990s through the early 2000s. His status as an artist is controversial: on the one hand, he takes on graphic design and advertising projects for major brands, and on the other, facing arrests in various countries for urban vandalism due to his interventions, thus serving as a prominent figure in the debate over the role of the artist and his ideology at this moment in the history of capitalist societies. He champions public space as the primary arena for artistic and cultural life, offering a critique of the aesthetic and physical hegemony of advertising, led by major financial corporations.