Curated by Giuseppe Pizzuto
Critical text by Giuseppe Pizzuto
Wunderkammern inaugurates its new venue with Shepard Fairey, one of the key artists in the history of Street Art, whose art has shown the evolution of a movement and its languages: from stickers to the creation of posters that envelop city walls.
Fairey (b. 1970, South Carolina), best known for the HOPE poster of Obama‘s presidential campaign, is the artist also known as OBEY GIANT, whose name derives from the ‘André the Giant has a Posse’ sticker campaign of 1989, when he was still only a university student.
After the solo exhibitions Force Majeure at MMOMA (Moscow, 2018) and 3 Decades of Dissent at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna (Rome, 2020), Shepard Fairey returns to Italy with the exhibition Strategies for a revolution, which includes a series of previously unseen works, personally selected by him, touching on the most important themes of his incredible career between underground culture and political activism, once again inviting the viewer to question and reflect on the system of contemporary society.
With his exhibition ‘Strategies for a revolution’ Shepard aims to overwhelm the viewer with his imagery and his ironic, propagandistic, iconic language. (…) The energy that is released by the images created by Shepard, no matter how many times we have the impression that we have ‘already seen‘ them, is always surprising. – G. Pizzuto
The works in the exhibition all revolve around one of the great themes of Shepard Fairey’s poetics – power –, represented in all its facets and meanings, both as a form of political tyranny and as a drive capable of liberating the masses from oppressors.
With his unmistakable style, inspired by Futurism and Russian Constructivism, through the graphic tradition of European dissident and avant-garde art. Shepard Fairey’s artistic versatility, however, is not only limited to the revival of models from the past, but also to the use of materials and techniques that are always different and unique; the exhibition, in fact, presents a selection of works created with techniques such as collage, silk-screen prints on different supports such as wood or aluminium, HPM on paper, and even vinyl covers.
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