Sid Smoking

SHEPARD FAIREY (B. 1970)

Sid Smoking

signed and dated by the artist on the front of the canvas

mixed media (stencil, silkscreen and collage) on canvas

41 x 30 inches (104.1 x 76.2 cm)

Executed in 2013.

Shepard Fairey's portrait of Sid Vicious — built from Dennis Morris's 1977 photographs of the Sex Pistols, the canonical visual record of the band's London period. Morris, granted complete access to the group across that year, produced a body of work that included the most reproduced photographs of Vicious in existence; Fairey's Sid Smoking draws directly on that archive, refracting Morris's photograph through Fairey's signature graphic vocabulary of red-and-cream halftone, Art Deco ornament and decorative ground-pattern that ties the work to the wider OBEY visual system.

The Sex Pistols were, by Fairey's own account, the band that changed his life — a friend played him Never Mind the Bollocks when he was fourteen, and the moment marked, in Fairey's words, "a turning point" in his orientation toward art, music and design. The Sid portrait has returned across multiple editions and HPMs since 2013 and remains among the most personally invested images in Fairey's punk-era output. The present canvas is the original mixed media work — stencilled, silkscreened and collaged by the artist on canvas — distinct from the paper editions of the image.

PROVENANCE:

From the artist's studio