Shepard Fairey, War by Numbers (2026)

War By Numbers (2026) is one of Shepard Fairey's most quietly devastating images — a large-format screenprint in which a young girl, rendered in his signature layered graphic style of deep crimson, amber, and black, bows her head over a rose held in both hands. The rose grows from the pin of a grenade. Above her, in the upper right corner, a formation of bombers crosses a blank sky. She does not look up.

The composition is structured as a classical portrait — the girl's downward gaze, her ribbon, her dress, the tenderness of the gesture — and the violence enters from the periphery and the detail: the grenade beneath the flower, the aircraft above, the irreconcilable coexistence of beauty and destruction in a single frame. Fairey has built his career on exactly this tension — between the iconic and the critical, the beautiful and the urgent — and War By Numbers is among his most formally accomplished expressions of it. The title, borrowed from the expression "painting by numbers," suggests the mechanical, the prescribed, the industrial reproduction of conflict — war as a system as much as an event, executed according to a template as familiar and as thoughtless as a children's activity kit.

The palette — crimson, amber, dark navy, cream — is Fairey at his most restrained and his most powerful, the colour doing political work without announcing it. Printed on 80# cream Speckletone paper in an edition of 300, hand-signed and numbered by the artist — a natural companion to Power (2026) for collectors building a coherent OBEY holdings.