Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters brought a joint work by Shepard Fairey, Damien Hirst and Invader to HENI Gallery in London from September 3 to 14, 2026. The free display at 6–10 Lexington Street presented a print based on their collaborative painting. That painting had appeared earlier in Triple Trouble at Newport Street Gallery; this was a separate presentation at another venue, centered on the edition.

HENI identifies the 2026 print as a Diasec-mounted giclée on aluminium composite panel, measuring 100 by 145.5 centimetres. The published edition consists of 200 prints and thirty artist’s proofs, with all three artists signing the label. These specifications describe the print being presented, rather than the original painting’s materials.

The image layers three recognizable visual approaches. Fairey’s patterned papers provide the underlying field, Hirst adds a grid of colored spots, and Invader introduces a pixelated wave derived from Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. A Space Invader figure appears to ride that wave. Invader’s account of the collaboration describes eight works on paper arriving from Fairey, Hirst assembling them into a larger composition, and his own wave completing the exchange.

That sequence offers a useful way to look at the result. Each intervention responds to a surface already changed by somebody else, so authorship develops through successive decisions. The spots impose a repeated order; the wave suggests a force that cannot be contained by the grid; the paper divisions give the eye another structure to follow. This reading does not require the motifs to disappear into a seamless shared style. Their differences provide much of the image’s energy.

The print also creates a second kind of translation. A composition assembled through several hands becomes one editioned surface, carrying the visual traces of collage, painting and pixel-based imagery without being made of all those original materials. Looking closely therefore involves distinguishing the image of a process from the physical process used to produce the object in front of the viewer.

The September gallery dates coincided with HENI’s application period for the edition, but a visit and a purchase were different activities. The public display offered an opportunity to inspect the collaborative image without acquiring it. Its exhibition identity rests on HENI’s explicit gallery announcement, not simply on the existence of an online release.