About the artwork
This work entitled Universal Personhood Lisbon, created in 2018 by Shepard Fairey in collaboration with Vhils, is presented as a silkscreen print that translates the meeting of two major artistic languages on the contemporary scene. The composition is organized around a black-and-white photographic urban landscape depicting a Lisbon street, onto which a monumental intervention combining portraiture and graphic design is inscribed. The female face, at the center of the image, is treated according to a duality characteristic of this collaboration: on the one hand, Shepard Fairey's graphic and ornamental aesthetic with its red flat tints and stylized motifs, and on the other, the eroded and fragmented texture typical of Vhils' work, evoking his mural sculpture techniques. This superimposition creates a visual tension between construction and destruction, surface and depth, printed image and altered matter. The whole is structured by a contrasting palette dominated by red, black and beige, giving the work a strong visual and symbolic presence. The print run, limited to 450 copies and here numbered 110, is designed to be widely distributed, while retaining the rarity of the contemporary print market.
Expert opinion
This work is a particularly pertinent example of the collaboration between Shepard Fairey and Vhils, two artists whose complementary practices have marked the evolution of street art towards hybrid forms. The combination of Fairey's direct, committed graphic approach and Vhils' work with matter, memory and erasure gives this piece a notable visual and conceptual richness. The composition, which integrates a real urban environment with a fictitious artistic intervention, bears witness to a reflection on the place of the image in public space and the way in which individual identities are inscribed in the fabric of cities. In terms of the market, the collaborations between these two artists enjoy sustained interest, particularly for editions dating from the late 2010s, a period of heightened international recognition for each of them. The print quality and the limited edition of 450 copies help to structure the value of the work. The state of preservation appears satisfactory in view of the images provided, although direct examination is recommended to confirm the integrity of the paper and margins. This piece will be of interest to collectors who are sensitive to the crossroads between urban art, photography and contemporary printmaking.
About the artist
The collaboration between Vhils and Shepard Fairey brings together two major figures in contemporary urban art, whose practices, though distinct, share a common desire to question image, memory and public space. Vhils, a Portuguese artist who came to prominence in the early 2000s, has made his mark with a unique approach that involves sculpting walls rather than covering them. Using excavation, engraving and erosion techniques, he reveals faces and strata hidden in urban surfaces, questioning the memory of places and the traces left by time. His work highlights the tensions between construction and destruction, visibility and erasure, in a constant dialogue with the social history of cities. Shepard Fairey is one of the most influential figures in contemporary street art and graphic design. Known for his OBEY project and his powerfully stylized images, he has been developing an aesthetic inspired by political propaganda, graphic design and popular imagery since the late 1980s. His often politically engaged work addresses social, environmental and political issues, combining visual impact with a direct message. The meeting between these two artists is particularly relevant, as it brings into dialogue two complementary approaches to the image. Vhils works in depth, revealing the image through subtraction and alteration of matter, while Shepard Fairey constructs strong, structured and immediately legible graphic surfaces. In their collaborations, these two languages merge to create works in which Vhils' sculptural, textured dimension blends with Fairey's visual, iconic power.
This dialogue between material and image, erosion and graphic construction, reflects an evolution in street art towards hybrid practices, capable of integrating different techniques and visual traditions. Their collaboration illustrates the way in which artists from this scene continue to renew their approaches by crossing their universes, while affirming the place of street art in the field of contemporary art.
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