SHEPARD FAIREY (OBEY) - Screen print "DEMOCRACIDAL TENDENCIES" 46x61cm - 2024

With Democracidal Tendencies, Shepard Fairey delivers a particularly dense composition, constructed like a collage of images and text fragments evoking the tensions running through American democracy. In the center, a pointed revolver dominates two hands bound by handcuffs, an immediately striking image around which slogans, press clippings, and references to civil rights overlap. The small American flag, isolated by its colors amidst a deliberately reduced palette of black, gray, and cream, focuses the gaze and emphasizes the political dimension of the whole. Fairey here employs the techniques that have characterized his work since the beginning: image hijacking, propaganda aesthetics, repetition, printing screens, and the juxtaposition of power symbols and messages of resistance. The title itself plays on words by bringing together "democracy" and "suicidal tendencies," giving the work the provocative tone typical of the punk culture from which the artist deeply originates.

The work is created in collaboration with Edward Colver, an American photographer closely associated with the punk and hardcore scene of Los Angeles, whose photographs from the 1980s have helped shape the visual imagination of this counterculture. This encounter is particularly coherent with Shepard Fairey's background: punk music, activist graphic design, documentary photography, and underground culture have long been essential sources of his work. Democracidal Tendencies thus superimposes Fairey's graphic efficiency with Colver's visual memory to construct an intentionally abrasive image. The presence of handcuffs, the weapon, and references to individual freedoms create a tension between authority, violence, and civil rights, without reducing the work to a purely illustrative reading. Printed in only 300 copies and bearing the pencil signatures of both artists, this screen print also holds the particular interest of a true collaboration between two figures from closely linked visual cultures.