Blek le Rat is the street art icon of whom Banksy said that everything he had done himself, Blek le Rat did 20 years before.
Blek le Rat was born as Xavier Prou in Paris in 1951. He was the pioneer of graffiti artists in Europe and one of the pioneers to use the stencils to create icons, instead of names. Blek le Rat first came into contact with graffiti in the early 70s in New York. Ten years later, he created his own street art work. Inspired by a stenciled portrait of Mussolini, he created a silhouette of a rat running in the streets, which very quickly became noticeable all over Paris.
Blek’s work was then shown in galleries around the world and featured in publications such as TIME Magazine, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.
In 2008, his first monograph “Getting Through Walls” was published by Thames + Hudson. In 2011, Art Publishing, Ltd published “Blek le Rat: 30th Anniversary Retrospective.”
