Blek le Rat, born Xavier Prou in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1951, is one of the foundational figures of modern street art and a pioneer of stencil art in public space. After encountering New York graffiti during a visit in 1971, Blek studied fine art and architecture in Paris before beginning to work on the city’s streets in 1981. Rather than reproduce the American graffiti styles that had first inspired him, he turned to stencils and developed a visual language of his own. His earliest recurring image was the rat — a play on the letters of ART — before his practice expanded into life-sized figures and increasingly ambitious compositions. Over more than four decades, Blek has used the street to explore freedom, identity, social responsibility and the lives of people occupying urban spaces. His combination of carefully constructed imagery and direct public placement helped establish a language that would become hugely influential within international stencil and street art. That influence has been openly acknowledged by subsequent generations. Banksy famously remarked in 2005 that whenever he thought he had painted something original, he would discover that Blek had done it twenty years earlier. Blek continues to create and exhibit internationally, evolving the ideas that first appeared on the streets of Paris while remaining closely connected to the stencil technique he helped bring to prominence. His original works and limited editions offer a direct connection to more than forty years of street-art history and to an artist whose influence can still be seen throughout the movement today.
