Shepard Fairey, the man behind OBEY GIANT. What started with an absurd sticker created in 1989 has since evolved into a worldwide street art campaign, as well as an acclaimed body of fine art.
The OBEY GIANT campaign takes cues from popular culture, commercial marketing and political messaging. The ideology and iconography of Fairey’s work focuses the self empowerment of those who refuse to be manipulated by the machine of manufactured consent. With biting sarcasm verging on reverse psychology, he goads viewers, using the imperative ‘OBEY’ to take head of the propagandists out to bend the world to their agendas.
Shepard Fairey’s art reached a new height of prominence in 2008 when his ‘Hope’ portrait of Barack Obama became the iconic image of the presidential campaign and helped inspire an unprecedented political movement. The original image now hangs in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., United States of America.
