This is Shepard Fairey's Rose Soldier — an original screen print hand-signed and numbered by Fairey in pencil. The composition presents a soldier in strict profile, rendered in deep navy blue against a blazing red background of radiating sunburst rays, holding a single rose aloft in a raised fist. The print distills Fairey's central artistic argument into a single image: the grammar and posture of military authority, repurposed and redirected toward an act of peace. A soldier standing at attention, but offering a flower instead of a weapon.

The color palette — red, white, and navy — is immediately legible as an American patriotic register, but Fairey deploys it without irony and without parody. The sunburst radiating behind the soldier is drawn from both Cold War Soviet poster design and Japanese imperial imagery, two visual traditions Fairey has studied and consistently quoted throughout his career. The OBEY compass star medallion — Fairey's signature multi-pointed star seal with floral wreath surround — appears on the soldier's uniform, claiming the figure for the OBEY canon without overwriting its ambiguity.

At the base of the composition, the "OBEY" wordmark is set in Fairey's characteristic blocky serif. The halftone dot work throughout the red zones and the distressed ink texture across the navy areas are both printed to a high standard — the kind of surface quality that photographs beautifully and rewards close inspection. This is a print that works as graphic statement at distance and as fine print object up close.

The image of a soldier holding a flower carries one of the most charged histories in the visual culture of protest and peace. The most famous instance — a young woman placing a carnation in the barrel of a National Guardsman's rifle during the 1967 March on the Pentagon — became one of the defining photographs of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. Fairey's Rose Soldier draws on that lineage deliberately: the soldier is not threatening, not marching, not at war. He is at attention, extended, offering. The rose held aloft is not a surrender — it is a proposal.

What Fairey does with this image that is distinctly his own is the register of the visual language. This is not a photograph. It is a poster — rendered in the high-contrast, limited-color, radiating-sunburst grammar of Soviet constructivist propaganda and Japanese imperial war art. The same visual vocabulary used to recruit soldiers, to inspire sacrifice, to demand obedience — here redirected toward an image of peace. The medium is, as always with Fairey, the message: you are looking at propaganda asking you to question what propaganda has always asked of you.

The OBEY compass medallion on the soldier's uniform situates the figure firmly within Fairey's ongoing fictional canon — this soldier serves the OBEY empire, not any nation-state. His allegiance is to the campaign, which is to say: to the question of allegiance itself. It is a subtle but important detail that separates the print from simple pacifist imagery and places it squarely in Fairey's conceptual project.

Born 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina, Shepard Fairey launched the Andre the Giant Has a Posse wheat-paste campaign in 1989 while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Over the following two decades, he built the OBEY Giant campaign into one of the most recognized bodies of street art in history — his imagery appeared on walls in dozens of countries, in galleries in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Tokyo, and in the collections of institutions that had previously shown no interest in street-derived work.

The 2008 Obama HOPE poster — which Fairey created in support of Barack Obama's presidential campaign — became one of the most widely reproduced political images of the 21st century and entered the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery. The recognition that followed transformed the secondary market for all Fairey's prior work. His prints are now held at MoMA New York, LACMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Library of Congress, and in major private collections internationally. Rose Soldier represents the OBEY canon at its most graphically powerful and thematically clear.

• Original Shepard Fairey Rose Soldier screen print
• Hand-signed by Shepard Fairey in pencil — lower margin
• Hand-numbered in pencil — lower margin (confirm edition details before listing)
• 3-color screen print on cream/white stock — unframed, stored flat
• Gauntlet Gallery digital provenance documentation