Newport Street Gallery, in association with HENI, to present the exhibition Triple Trouble, uniting three disruptive artists: Shepard Fairey, Damien Hirst, and Invader.
All images: Artworks © the artists Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
The exhibition is curated by Connor Hirst, will feature a dynamic mix of individual works alongside bold new collaborations, many of which will be revealed to the public for the very first time.
Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, and mosaic, the exhibition will explore the intersections of contemporary art, street culture, and pop iconography. Fairey, Hirst, and Invader have combined forces to create a series of hybrid works that defy categorisation while amplifying their shared fascination with repetition, symbols, and cultural icons.
“In addition to being troublemakers of the art world, Damien and Shepard are two art giants whose work I admire. Combining our three styles could only result in some astonishing artworks. The creative process itself was very exciting with hundreds of messages, ideas and artworks travelling back and forth between the three of us. It was a great adventure and I hope the public will enjoy discovering this exhibition as much as we enjoyed creating it.”
– Invader
Artworks © the artists Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
This ambitious exhibition, which spans all six gallery spaces at Newport Street Gallery, celebrates both the individuality of each artist and the synergy that emerges when their practices collide. Visitors will encounter familiar motifs – Fairey’s OBEY iconography, Hirst’s spots and cabinets, Invader’s space mosaics – reconfigured in provocative and playful ways that challenge the boundaries between fine art and street culture.
Show highlights include: collaborative Spin Paintings and spot artworks merging Hirst’s iconic techniques with Fairey’s politically charged graphics and Invader’s pixelated interventions; Rubik’s Cube mosaics reimagined in large-scale panels featuring subjects from science and music to counterculture figures presented alongside Fairey’s mixed media works; as well as tanks, pill cabinets, and lightboxes that blend Hirst’s clinical precision with the irreverence of Invader and Fairey’s street art. Also on show will be a never-before-seen mural transforming Newport Street Gallery into a collision of fine art tradition and urban visual language.
“Why would I want to collaborate on an exhibition with Space Invader and Damien Hirst? Well, I’ve long respected both artists because they are intelligent, conceptual, and relentless in their singular creative visions. “Obsessive” might be too mild a description to convey their drive, focus, and prodigious output. I can relate to them. I also admire risk-takers and troublemakers who can withstand condescending, impolite jabs from supposedly polite society.
How dare Damien Hirst make art of dead animals in formaldehyde, forcing us to confront death, and then turn around and create undeniably appealing, hypnotically repetitive, content-free paintings of colorful spots! Space Invader had the audacity to take the 8-bit pixelated syntax of an ’80s video game and convert it to a street art aesthetic using tile mosaics that are a clever play on these visual analogies, but would seem to have limited long-term potential. Not only has Invader found endless ways to create within the confines of very narrow creative variables, but he has also been arrested many times for his prolific street bombing.
Invader has mosaics up in cities worldwide, with over 1,000 in Paris alone. Damien and Invader are visual and conceptual problem solvers who set their own rules. Those qualities inspired me to collaborate with them even though our aesthetics have no natural overlap or compatibility. A clash of styles in collaboration is a risk worth taking, and creativity can solve almost all problems. Malcolm McLaren once told me, “A glorious failure is better than a boring success.” So, with that as a guiding principle, what could possibly go wrong?”
– Shepard Fairey
“What I’ve really enjoyed is the powerful sensibility of both these guys, and it pushes me to think more, down to millimetres and distances between things and colours, and there’s lots and lots and lots of surprises. So I think there’s excitement in the differences and in the similarities. Artists can be notoriously difficult to work with whereas these two are very rare in the art world because they’re great people as well as great artists. I think anything done well is great art. It’s art if you do something well, to such an extreme. We all love punk. I just wanted to change people’s minds, I didn’t even care what into, I wanted to lay eggs in people’s brains. I always thought you have to upset people, but you don’t want the art to turn them away. You want to turn them on, want to get a hold of them with that kind of power. But you have to get a hold of them and push them away at the same time to engage them with a violence that they’re almost unprepared to accept. And Shepard and Space both do that.”
– Damien Hirst
Triple Trouble, 10th October 2025 – 29th March 2026 Newport Street Gallery
Tuesday – Sunday, 10AM-6PM Free Entry
About the Artists
Shepard Fairey is a contemporary street artist, graphic designer, activist, and founder of OBEY Clothing and creative agency Studio Number One. In 1989, while at Rhode Island School of Design studying for his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration, Shepard Fairey created the “Andre the Giant has a Posse” sticker that later evolved into the OBEY GIANT art campaign. In 2008, his portrait of then-Democratic candidate
Barack Obama became an internationally recognized emblem of hope. He is known for the “We The People” campaign debuted during the 2017 Women’s Marches worldwide. Fairey has painted nearly 140 public murals, become one of the most sought-after and provocative artists globally, changing the way people converse about art and view the urban landscape.
Damien Hirst (b. 1965) was born in Bristol, England, and lives and works in London, Devon, and Gloucestershire, England. Collections include the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, Italy; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; Tate, London; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland; National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Art Institute of Chicago; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan.
Exhibitions include Cornucopia, Oceanographic Museum of Monaco (2010); Tate Modern, London (2012); Relics, Qatar Museums Authority, Al Riwaq (2013); Signification (Hope, Immortality and Death in Paris, Now and Then), Deyrolle, Paris (2014); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2015); The Last Supper, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2016); Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice (2017); Damien Hirst at Houghton Hall: Colour Space Paintings and Outdoor Sculptures, Houghton Hall, Norfolk, England (2019); Mental Escapology, St. Moritz, Switzerland (2021); Cherry Blossoms, Fondation Cartier, Paris (2021); Archaeology Now, Galleria Borghese, Rome (2021); The Weight of Things, MUCA, Munich (2023-2024); and To Live Forever (For a While), Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2024). Hirst received the Turner Prize in 1995.
The elusive street artist Invader uses his now ubiquitous pixelated characters to unpretentiously bring art to the masses. Self-described as an Unidentified Free Artist (UFA) whose identity is perennially hidden behind masks and digital pixelations, his pseudonym reflects his artistic practice – to invade (often illegally) spaces with viral art since 1998. The nearly 90 territories he has invaded include the
International Space Station, the seabed off the coast of Cancún and a remote city located at an altitude of 4000 meters above sea level where he had installed his 4000th mosaic in 2021. The discovery of a mosaic by Invader has become akin to an international treasure hunt for the 482.000 players of ‘Flashinvaders’, the free app he has developed. In a span of 30 years, Invader has expanded his practice into new media, delving into Rubik’s Cube sculptures in his Rubikcubist series, and produced installations, films and acclaimed exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide.
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