Damien Hirst Spent 30 Years Preserving Sharks in Tanks. His Newest Show Put a Space Invader in One.

July 4, 2026

Damien Hirst built a career on dead sharks preserved in tanks of formaldehyde. His newest show put a Space Invader in one instead.

the Newport Street Gallery building exterior in London. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Six rooms, three names that rarely share a wall

Triple Trouble, curated by Connor Hirst, opened at Newport Street Gallery in London on October 10, 2025 and ran through March 29, 2026, spanning all six of the gallery's exhibition spaces with new collaborative work by Hirst, Shepard Fairey, and the French mosaic artist Invader, according to FAD Magazine. Admission was free for the full run, and Obey Giant billed the show as three practices colliding rather than three artists hanging work side by side in separate rooms.

a collaborative spot painting merging Damien Hirst and Shepard Fairey styles. Image: www.newarteditions.com.

Spot paintings, spin paintings, and a Rubik's Cube full of counterculture

The collaborative pieces fused Hirst's signature spin paintings and spot canvases with Fairey's political graphics and Invader's pixel-based interventions, according to Artlyst. Elsewhere in the gallery, Invader's Rubik's Cube mosaics, built from thousands of individually twisted cubes, were blown up into large-scale panels depicting figures pulled from science, music, and counterculture history, hung next to Fairey's mixed-media work built around the same subjects.

The tanks

The show's sharpest move was literal. Hirst has spent three decades preserving dead animals inside glass-and-steel vitrine tanks. Triple Trouble filled some of those same tank forms with Invader's mosaics and Fairey's graphics instead of sharks and cows, shown alongside pill cabinets and lightboxes built the same way, blending Hirst's clinical display cases with the two street artists' rougher-edged work, according to Artlyst's account of the show. HENI Editions released new print editions from all three artists across the five-month run, according to HENI.

Fairey and Invader have merged their icons before, but Hirst rarely shares wall space with anyone, let alone two artists who built careers getting arrested for putting work up without permission. Sealing a street bomber's pixel mosaic inside the same tank format Hirst uses for a shark is either the biggest compliment London street art got from the establishment all year, or the most expensive vitrine a Space Invader has ever ended up trapped in.