This is Shepard Fairey’s Printing Press — a richly mechanical, symbol-dense offset lithograph printed in deep black ink on cream Speckletone paper, from the celebrated 2017 “Damaged Stencil Series.” It is part of a set of eight prints released together in December 2017 to accompany Fairey’s largest-ever solo exhibition, DAMAGED, at Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles. The series was sold exclusively as a complete 8-print set: individual prints were never available separately at retail, making single examples genuinely scarce on the secondary market.

The composition centers on a massive industrial gear wheel crowned by dramatic, towering flames — a burning cog that serves as the print’s visual and ideological engine. Inscribed within the gear is a bold five-pointed star, evoking both revolutionary iconography and the OBEY star motif. The central image is flanked and threaded through with intricate, circuit-board-like line work: pipes, valves, molecular chain diagrams, and precision-engineered mechanical schematics rendered in crisp white against dense black fields. To the right, a classical profile bust — the kind lifted from Greco-Roman sculpture or Enlightenment-era engraving — gazes into the machinery, positioned between the mechanical world and the ornamental damask background that layers behind everything. The upper-left field contains collaged newspaper and advertisement ephemera, partially legible — fragments of industrial-era trade copy bleeding through the stencil layers like ghost text from a buried past.

The ragged, fraying borders throughout the composition are printed design elements — Fairey’s deliberate simulation of distressed, worn-down stencils pulled from a wall. They give the print the raw urgency of street ephemera while the subject matter — the printing press as both tool of liberation and instrument of control — anchors it in one of Fairey’s most enduring preoccupations: who controls the means of communication, and to what end.

Printing Press is the most mechanically abstract work in the Damaged Stencil Series, and in many ways its most self-referential. A print about printing — about the physical machinery that produces the kind of mass communication Fairey’s entire career has inhabited — this work folds its medium into its subject. The burning gear is not a symbol of destruction but of transformation: fire as the forge, the cog as the engine of information production, the machine that can liberate or oppress depending entirely on who operates it and for whose benefit.

The circuit-board schematics and molecular chain diagrams layered into the mechanical body of the composition are a formal bridge between industrial-era production and contemporary networked information systems — Fairey drawing a direct line from Gutenberg’s press to the digital architectures that now shape public discourse. The classical bust at right — a figure of institutional authority and high culture — gazes into this machinery with an ambiguous expression: awe, complicity, or resignation. The newspaper fragments bleeding through the background complete the circuit: the press produces the paper that produces the message that shapes the crowd.

As with all prints in the series, the monochrome black-on-cream palette strips away Fairey’s signature multi-color aesthetic in favor of the raw urgency of stencil work — the visual language of underground communication, protest printing, and revolutionary pamphlets. The burning gear reads as both warning and call to action: the machine is on fire, and whether that fire is destructive or generative is the question the viewer is left to answer.

This is one of eight prints in the Damaged Stencil Series, each 18″ × 24″ offset on cream Speckletone, edition of 400:

Born 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina, Shepard Fairey studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and launched his career with the Andre the Giant Has a Posse wheat-paste campaign — one of the first viral street art movements — which evolved into the global OBEY brand. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, MoMA New York, LACMA, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His 2008 Obama HOPE poster remains one of the most recognized political images of the 21st century. Printing Press is among his most introspective works — an artist who built a career through mass-printed imagery examining the machinery that made it possible.

• Original Shepard Fairey Printing Press offset lithograph, Damaged Stencil Series, 2017
• Hand-signed in pencil by Shepard Fairey
• Hand-numbered in pencil — numbered edition of 400
• Single-color black offset on cream Speckletone paper — unframed, stored flat
• Gauntlet Gallery digital provenance documentation