The Newport Street Gallery is hosting Triple Trouble, an ambitious exhibition that brings together three of contemporary art’s most provocative figures — Shepard Fairey, Damien Hirst, and Invader. The show, presented in association with HENI, is curated by Connor Hirst (Damien’s son) and marks the first time the trio have worked collectively and collaboratively on such a scale.
Across all six gallery spaces, Triple Trouble stages a collision between fine art, street culture and pop iconography. Fairey, Hirst and Invader — artists from distinct traditions but united by an appetite for risk — have created new works that merge their visual vocabularies in unexpected ways. Painting, sculpture, installation and mosaic are all reimagined through their shared fascination with repetition, symbolism and the visual grammar of mass culture.
Visitors can expect familiar motifs, but reconfigured with a mischievous charge. Hirst’s immaculate spot paintings and pill cabinets intersect with Fairey’s politically edged graphics and Invader’s pixel mosaics. Spin paintings are overlaid with OBEY imagery; Rubik’s Cube mosaics expand into monumental panels; tanks and vitrives are transformed through acts of visual sabotage. A new site-specific mural — part intervention, part takeover — transforms the gallery itself into a hybrid between a white cube and an urban wall.
Each artist approaches collaboration as both experiment and confrontation. Fairey describes the project as “a clash of styles worth the risk,” citing Malcolm McLaren’s belief that “a glorious failure is better than a boring success.” For him, the show honours the gumption of artists who test boundaries and refuse complacency. Hirst, meanwhile, relishes the friction of working alongside others. “There’s excitement in the differences and the similarities,” he says. “We all love punk. You want to grab people and push them away at the same time — that’s how you make them feel alive.”
Invader, ever the stealth operator, sees the venture as a global conversation played out in physical space: “Hundreds of ideas, images and messages travelled between us. The process itself became the artwork.”
What emerges from Triple Trouble is not simply collaboration but collision — a deliberate tension between control and chaos, precision and street-level energy. Together, Fairey, Hirst and Invader dismantle the divisions that once separated the gallery from the street, the collector’s wall from the public facade.
This exhibition is a masterclass in visual cross-pollination. Triple Trouble promises to be one of the year’s most unpredictable exhibitions — a reminder that art, at its best, thrives on the charge of disagreement.
Go and see this exhibition!
Photos/Words PCR
Triple Trouble
10 October 2025 – 29 March 2026 – Newport Street Gallery, London – Tuesday–Sunday, 10 am–6 pm | Free Entry