Shepard Fairey and Invader met in 1999. They have crossed paths on walls and in galleries ever since, but they never actually welded their two symbols into one image. That changed with Obey Invader, a four-print series that puts Fairey's Obey Star dead center inside Invader's pixel grid.
Two visual languages built for the same job
Fairey built Obey around a single command: pay attention. The Obey Star is a blunt, repeatable icon designed to spread the way propaganda spreads, through sheer repetition on stickers, posters, and walls. Invader works from the opposite direction. He constructs his figures out of ceramic tile mosaics modeled on the low-resolution aliens from the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders, then installs them on buildings across cities worldwide as part of an ongoing project he treats like a global scavenger hunt.
Both artists build images meant to be instantly recognized and endlessly copied. Obey Invader is the first time their systems run through each other instead of next to each other.
What the prints actually are
The series is four silkscreens, each with embossing on cotton rag paper, framed in white aluminum at 53.3 by 72.3 centimeters. Every print comes from an edition of 250 plus 50 artist's proofs, numbered and hand-signed by both Fairey and Invader on the front. In each piece, the Obey Star sits at the center of a mandala-style grid built from repeating tiles, rendered in blue, red, or cream colorways. Look at the negative space between the tiles and Invader's pixelated alien resolves out of the pattern.
HENI Editions released the series to coincide with new works the pair showed at Newport Street Gallery in London.
A third artist walks in
That gallery belongs to Damien Hirst, and the show is called Triple Trouble, running from October 10, 2025 to March 29, 2026. It is not just a two-hander. HENI also released a separate print, Invaded and Commanded Blossom, that layers Fairey's Obey icon face and Invader's mosaics into scenes built from Hirst's own spot and blossom paintings. Three artists who each spent decades building a signature repeatable mark ended up trading marks with each other in the same room.
Why the fusion is the story
None of this happened by accident. Fairey and Invader have collaborated on and off since a 2019 capsule collection, but a full visual merger is a different thing than a joint drop. Obey Invader forces two symbols built on completely different logic, propaganda repetition versus arcade pixelation, to physically share the same few centimeters of paper. The result reads as a single new icon rather than two artists' work stapled together, which is the harder trick and the reason collectors and critics are paying attention now instead of shrugging at another collab print.
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