Damien Hirst, Shepard Fairey, and Gavin Turk Push Print Boundaries at IFPDA
At Paul Stolper’s IFPDA booth, YBAs Damien Hirst and Gavin Turk show works that have never before been exhibited outside of London, alongside street artist/presidential portraitist Shepard Fairey. While all three artists have established themselves within the print genre, through appropriation and innovation they offer new insights on the medium and its significance to contemporary art.
Damien Hirst revives two previous projects with the use of lenticular prints—digital prints that are covered with lenticular lenses to create an optical effect where the image changes depending on the angle at which it is viewed. Psilocybin, available for sale on Artsy, features Hirst’s famous dots, which when seen in person, appear to dance before the viewer’s eyes. His other print, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is an image of his notorious stuffed tiger shark in formaldehyde. Through translating the work into print form, Hirst gives the icon of ’90s art new life and greater accessibility.
Shepard Fairey sprinkles diamond dust on the surface of his new prints, Obey Lotus Diamond and Obey Lotus Crescent. Using the quintessentially superficial material that was popularized by Warhol with his large-scale prints of shoes in the early ’80s, Fairey infuses the works with material value aside from their worth as works of art. His first endeavors with diamond dust, in these new works Fairey embeds his iconic “OBEY” logo inside of a pentagram, and appropriates Islamic lotus and crescent motifs. At once extravagant and alluring, these prints, like Hirst’s, can only be done justice when seen in person.
Gavin Turk’s Double Silver Pop Gun and Double Gold Pop Gun works that will debut at IFPDA are part of the artist’s series in which he portrayed himself as Warhol’s Elvis, dressed as Sid Vicious. The prints tie into Turk’s consideration of authorship, authenticity and identity within his art—as he discussed in an exclusive interview with Artsy. His other prints to be shown at the booth, Sneer (Lilac) and Sneer (Yellow), are named after the small sneering mouths that Turk has experimented with in the past.
On view at Paul Stolper Gallery, IFPDA Print Fair 2013, Booth 119, Nov. 7th-10th.
