Indepth Arts News:
"Shepard Fairey - Obey"
2006-06-05 until 2006-07-29
Galerie Magdo Danysz
Paris, ,
FR France
Galerie Magda Danysz in France brings Shepard Fairey in Obey to a solo exhibition. The visual codes used by Shepard Fairey, aka Obey Giant, are worthy of those of Stalinist propaganda, but here they highlight the mechanisms of advertising propaganda which invade public space. As an aesthetic consideration of the form and content of art itself, the case of Shepard Fairey presents a modest, almost trivial joke that has totally run amok, and as it gets ever grander in scope, it just will not play itself out. Rather, Shepard Fairey's flippant prank continues to accrue greater intensity, complexity, ambition and sophistication.
Currently based in Los Angeles, where his design firm Number One is landing high-level corporate accounts from companies eager to see how his commercial parodies can help sell their products, Fairey's rising success has helped transform his once homemade Xerox style into lush multi-colored screen prints. There's no telling what these images are selling, but whatever it is, it's all so seductive that it's hard to resist.
Fairey has long been haunting consumer culture with an ambitious mocking street campaign featuring an omnipresent Andre the Giant. An astute student in the arts of persuasion, Fairey began his epic satire on the science of celebrity endorsements and the alchemy of suggesting desire back in 1989, while he was still a student at The Rhode Island School of Design. Since then his propaganda has been proliferated through stickers, clothing, skateboards, posters, stencil based graffiti and even a documentary film, to spread over the United States and the unsuspecting world at large.
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