Triple Trouble

Take the world’s best known contemporary art brat, throw in a generous helping of the second best known street artist, season with the artist with over half a million players on his art treasure hunt game, set blender to “Pop” and you will end up with … “Triple Trouble”, a fabulous mess!

Each of the artists in this group show is probably well known to you, though perhaps Damien Hirst might need some introduction (art world insiders will be spitting their caviar at that). In the 1980s Hirst was pretty much the actual leader of the then controversial YBAs, the Young British artists, predominantly coming out of Goldsmiths College in London and championed by Charles Saatchi. Hirst is probably best known for sharks in tanks, bleeding cows heads, spot paintings, spin painting, butterfly paintings, as in paintings made with iridescent butterflies not paintings of butterflies.

Triple Trouble Damien Hirst, Shepard Fairey, Space Invader — “Dissection Under A Microscope”, Hirst/Shepard Fairey

The show is being held in Hirst’s own London gallery which gives you a measure of his success, his art fortune runs to millions, if not hundreds of millions. The space is HUGE, and the thing with huge galleries is they take a lot of filling. A relevant common denominator between these three is that none of them are beginners! Shepard Fairey started his art career in the late 80s, Invader got going late 90s and Hirst as already explained has been at it longer than those two. Marketers and influencers call this kind of art exhibition a blockbuster, critics might line up somewhere between epic and indulgent. They and their assistants certainly rise to the challenge of filling the space.

To meet the need for huge quantities of art the artists have basically smashed each other’s signature pieces into each of the other’s signature pieces, sometimes the result is a car crash, sometimes it’s a beautifully grafted new flower. Still, it’s great to see a group show majoring on actual collaborations rather than wildly different versions of a common theme. Cranking the handle on the Hirst art tombola results in most of Hirst’s signature styles appearing with added Invader and Fairey seasoning. The display includes Hirst and Invader spin painting, Hirst and Fairy spin painting (both awesome but a significant debt is owed to the various StolenSpace Fairey/ D*Face and Sunny and Kai collabs seen down the years at StolenSpace). To continue: there are Hirst/Invader and Hirst/Fairey pill vitrines; Hirst/Invader and Hirst/Fairey butterfly paintings – on close inspection some of them appear to be actual butterflies, or, if they are not real they are compelling reproductions; Hirst/Invader and Hirst/Fairey shark tanks; Hirst/Invader and Hirst/Fairey spot paintings; Hirst/Invader and Hirst/Fairey scalpel images (are they paintings, or sculpture/painting installations?) and so on, through the whole Hirst oeuvre.

The art is big, it’s certainly bold, it’s bright and it is pop! The Obey Giant spin paintings and cherry blossom Invaders looked fabulous, like a victory parade in Spring.

If you are thinking “yeah, Fairey and Invader are street artists I get that but how does Hirst fit in?”, there is more to Hirst’s involvement than merely hosting and bankrolling. Hirst was a huge Banksy benefactor in his early career, providing studio space and funding when Banksy first moved to London in 2000. Banksy and Hirst collaborated on a canvas “keep It Spotless” which was sold at a charity auction in New York in 2007 with Bono as auctioneer, the $1.8million price tag distorted Banksy’s reported art pricing for more than a decade as nothing else by Banksy came close to that number – it was the Hirst factor and ostentatious charity auction bidding that resulted in that price. Invader and Shepard Fariey all benefitted form the Banksy rising tide of street art in the early to mid 00s and indeed shared gallerists and print publisher Pictures on Walls.

“Keep It Spotless”, Damien Hirst and Banksy, 2007, photo courtesy Hirst and Sothebys

Each of the three artists has a selection of their own individual gallery art works. There are Shepard Fairey icon portraits hung salon style, Invader rubik cube images and a few massive earlier Hirst sculptures. The presence of the latter curious didn’t sit comfortably with the hoard of Hirst collaborations produced for this show nor did they draw adequate from the well of Hirst’s youthful talent to stimulate and shock, they looked a little forlorn and out of place.

Being in London for the show, Fairey and Invader led Hirst astray and got some street art up, as reviewed in “Shepard Fairey Space Invader Damien Hirst in Shoreditch”, the least cryptic blog post title in street art history. If you can do some kind of clever split screen side-by-side viewing you can possibly see how the street art pieces morph into the gallery.

Invader’s mission appropriation of the imperious OBEY image is genius though the version he put up on the streets of London half way through the show run had evolved for the outdoor situation with the addition of a simulated paper peel.

The most spectacular street piece was the three day mural painting exercise combining motifs from each of the contributors, including obey stencils and fleur-de-Lys patterns by Shapard Fairey, the latter have been appearing regularly in his work since his collabs with the master of Moorish influenced tiling Diogo Machado. Hirst’s spot paintings appear and Invader has done a reference to Hirst’s epic bling fest “For The Love OF God” (Hirst’s mini homage to himself “For Heaven’s Sake” is in a vitrine in the show). The form is a love letter to the layered palimpsest of torn posters on the streets, Shepard Fairey loves those simulated painted tears.

Damien Hirst, Shepard Fairey, Space Invader collaborative mural Shoreditch 2025 — Hirst/Invader/Fairey work in progress, Bethnal Green Rd, Oct 2025

Few artworks can match the conceptual impact of “The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living”, Hirst’s shark in a tank. The experience of confronting a killer in formaldehyde, a deadly killing machine dead, was intense and raised the bar for contemporary art in the 90s. Replicating the visual semantics of the tank with a giant space invader inside is little more than convenient space filling. In a world gone totally fucking mad with insane invasions and bullies flexing superior air power to bring death to civilians from the skies, an Invader in a tank says nothing about invasion. You could print out this sentence, paste it to stone and pop it in your fish bowl and it would bear as much relationship to the genius of the original as “Secrets From The Deep”.

When you have the financial resources of Damien Hirst, the fetishizing by the art markets, the set piece exhibitions allied with the “Emperor Is Present” god/artist/genius status, the occasional indulgent stinker pongs the place out. The underwater archaeology fiction “Treasures From The Wreck Of The Unbelievable” wasn’t a joke well received when it first, apologies in advance here, surfaced in Venice. Time has been less than kind to the idea of this artworld Disneyfication, that raving mermaid on the banks of the Thames at Greenwich Peninsula is risible. A generous interpretation might have been to see it as a critique of the taste-free, ostentatious hosing of money onto art world bling but this doesn’t hold water with two collaborators from a completely different aesthetic and conceptual arena. It looks like something Madame Tussauds might have assembled from a wetsuit shop closing down sale. The title “Three Divers Discovering Gold Objects” points to either extreme dumbing down or collective exhaustion of the imagination. Expect to see it annotated on Admiralty charts as “sunken wreck, do not disturb”.

Those two elements “Secrets From The Deep” and Three Divers” aside, this show was a fun, impressive and exciting explosion of accessible pop art and contemporary ideas. It may be a while before the world sees street artists get the resources, space and time to do so much mainstream art.