Background
Blek le Rat (born Xavier Prou) was born on November 15, 1952 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France.
Blek le Rat (born Xavier Prou) was born on November 15, 1952 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France.
Blek Le Rat studied fine art and architecture at Beaux-Arts in Paris, graduating in 1982.
Blek began his artwork in 1981, painting stencils of rats on the walls of Paris streets. His name originates from the comic book Blek le Roc, using "rat" as an anagram for "art".
In 1983 Blek began to paint life-size stencils, which alongside his rats, have become his trademark and have influenced generations of street artists around the world.
Blek worked consistently through the 1990s and 2000s. His oldest preserved street art graffito is a 1991 replica of Caravaggio's Madonna di Loreta, which was rediscovered behind posters on a house wall in Leipzig, Germany, in 2012.
Blek was arrested in 1991 while he was stencilling a replica of Caravaggio's Madonna and Child. From that point on, he has worked exclusively with pre-stenciled posters, citing the speedier application of the medium to walls, as well as lessened punishment should he be caught in the act.
In 2006 he began his series of images representing the homeless, which depict them standing, sitting, or lying on sidewalks, in attempts to bring attention to what he regards as a global problem.
In October 2006, Blek le Rat had his first solo U.K. exhibition in London at the Leonard Street Gallery. He participated in the Cans Festival in 2008, which featured outdoor street stencil painting in Waterloo, London by many of street art's biggest names.
His American gallery debut took place at Subliminal Projects Gallery in Los Angeles in 2008. It included paintings, silkscreen, and three-dimensional artwork.
Blek also had an exhibition in December 2009 at the Metro Gallery in Melbourne, a centre of street art in Australia. The exhibition entitled "Le Ciel Est Bleu, La Vie Est Belle" ("The sky is blue, life is beautiful"), featured wooden panels, canvas, screen-print, and photographs, tracing the artist's oeuvre from the early 1980s to the present.
Mona Lisa
Resist
Violinist
Subliminal Projects
Danseuse Espagnole
Mother and Child, Los Angeles
Sleeping Man
Man Who Walks Through Walls
Beggar
Subliminal Projects
Graffiti at Mitte, Berlin
Subliminal Projects
His Master's Voiceless (Green)
Blek Le Rat 2007
Spaceman
Subliminal Projects
Subliminal Projects
Stencil on Market and Franklin, San Francisco
I Love Beef
Ballerina
Last Tango in Paris
Riot Police at Blender, Germany
La gitane a la guitare
Couple de danseurs
Occupational Force
Desert Storm
Graffiti in Los Angeles
Stencil on Rivington Street, Shoreditch, London
Subliminal Projects
In the mid 2000s, Blek’s work evolved to become more overtly political. Following the kidnapping of French journalist Florence Aubenas in Iraq, Blek pasted hundreds of prints of her image around Paris. Her portrait appeared everywhere, from her work place at Libération, next to cafés and offices of major newspapers. This activation aimed to attract the attention of the media and politicians to raise awareness of her situation.
Blek considers his images as gifts to the cities of the world, raising awareness of social issues. In 2006 he began his series of images representing the homeless, which depict them standing, sitting, or lying on sidewalks, in attempts to bring attention to what he considers as a global problem.
Dedicated to the idea of bringing art to the people, Blek often quotes the old masters like Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Guido Reni and Leonardo da Vinci.
Quotations:
“I want the characters of the paintings to walk out of the museums to give them back to the people of the city.”
“I became aware of my power and responsibilty as an artist working in the public space.“
"Sometimes images have a bigger impact than reality.“
"People say Banksy copies me, but I don't think so. I'm the old man, he's the new kid, and if I'm an inspiration to an artist that good, I love it. I feel what he is doing in London is similar to the rock movement in the Sixties."
"When I see Banksy making a man with a child or Banksy making rats, of course I see immediately where he takes the idea. I do feel angry. When you're an artist you use your own techniques. It's difficult to find a technique and style in art so when you have a style and you see someone else is taking it and reproducing it, you don't like that. I'm not sure about his integrity. Maybe he has to show his face now and show what kind of guy he is."
“I love to work in places I don’t know because these locations allow me to get in touch with a new atmosphere, new lights, and new people. If I continued to work in Paris I would have the instinct to do the same thing over and over again, without making any progress.”
His wife is Sybille Prou, to whom he dedicated replica of Caravaggio's Madonna di Loreta in 1991.
In 1985, Blek visited the first meeting of the graffiti and urban art movement in Bondy (France), on the VLP's initiative, with Speedy Graphito, Kim Prisu, Epsylon Point, and Futura (Leonard Hilton McGurr).
