Blek le advice

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Xavier Prou, 2011

Blek le Rat (* 1951 in Boulogne-Billancourt , France , real name: Xavier Prou ) is considered the forefather of stencil art ( street art ) in public spaces - although punks had already used this technique to spread their graffiti before him . The pseudonym is based on the French comic figure Blek le Roc .

He studied graphics and then architecture at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts from 1971 to 1983.

Blek le Rat started out as the artist duo BLEK together with his friend Gérard Dumas. In October 1981, both of them tried to paint a hands-free piece on Rue des Thermopyles in Paris' 14th arrondissement, inspired by New York graffiti writing that Blek le Rat had seen on a trip to the USA in the early 1970s however, completely failed in his eyes. He then suggested making pochoirs , as he remembered seeing small stenciled graffiti with Mussolini's head wearing a helmet in Padova as a child on a trip to Italy with his parents . From now on he works with this technique. His first motifs were small-format works such as rats, tanks and bananas.

Blek le Rat's artistic development was decisively influenced by David Hockney's film A Bigger Splash . Blek le Rat describes the scene in which Hockney painted the figure of one of his friends on the wall of his apartment with a brush and oil paint as the most impressive thing he had ever seen. During his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he came across Ernest Pignon-Ernest 's posters of life-size drawings and photographs by anonymous or famous people in the 6th arrondissement (Paris) , from which he was inspired, especially with regard to the location.

At the end of 1983 the duo BLEK separated and so Xavier Prou ​​adopted the name BLEK LE RAT.

Also in 1983 he sprayed his first large-format stencil, which shows an old man from Northern Ireland with a peaked cap, abusing British soldiers. A photo in the French newspaper Liberation served as a motif . Many more large-format works followed. So z. B. Tom Waits , Joseph Beuys , Andy Warhol , François Mitterrand , Marcel Dassault , Fauns, Centaurs, Jesus Christ and various Madonnas modeled on old masters such as Michelangelo or Caravaggio as well as a self-portrait with suitcases full of pochoirs. Blek le Rat himself says of his work: “They are my characters, they all resemble me in some way, they introduced me to the world as one person introduces himself to another. Whenever I painted them on the walls, I felt like I was leaving a part of myself on the walls of every city I visited. ”From 1983 onwards, other pochoirists followed his example. The École de Blek le Rat postulated by the French newspaper Le Monde in 1987 included the pochoirists Jérome Mesnager, Marie Rouffet, Thierry Gauthé, Etherno, Epsilon, Miss.Tic and Surface Active.

In addition to his hometown of Paris, he has worked in cities such as Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig, Wiesbaden, London, New York, San Francisco, Florence, Naples, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Marrakech and Munich .

A stencil graffito “Madonna with Child” created in 1991, which Blek le Rat dedicated to his great love, his current wife Sybille, was rediscovered in Leipzig at the beginning of 2012 . It was pasted over with posters for years. In summer 2012 it was restored by the artist and has meanwhile been included in the Saxon list of monuments. According to the artist, the work is the oldest surviving traces of his art.

literature

  • Sybille Prou, King ADZ: BLEK LE RAT - En Traversant les Murs (Thames and Hudson), ISBN 978-2-87811-311-2 .
  • Sybille Metze-Prou: Graffiti Art # 11 - Graffiti in Paris , Berlin (Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf) 2000, ISBN 3-89602-343-8 .
  • Bernhard van Treeck : Pochoir - the art of stencil graffiti , Berlin, Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2000.
  • Bernhard van Treeck : The large graffiti lexicon , Berlin, Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2001.
  • Julia Reinecke: Street Art: A Subculture Between Art and Commerce (Transcript), 2007, ISBN 978-3-89942-759-2 .
  • Johannes Stahl: Interview with BLEK le Rat, Paris, in: Johannes Stahl (Ed.): On the wall. Graffiti between anarchy and gallery , Cologne (dumont) 1989 pp. 160–169. ISBN 3-7701-2363-8 .
  • Marc Ambroise-Rendu: L'école de Blek le Rat . Le Monde, Paris November 7th 1986.

Web links

Commons : Blek le Rat  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A long-forgotten graffiti in Leipzig today can tell of art, politics and a great love , Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin Jetzt.de from June 3, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Blek le advice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Xavier Prou ​​(real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French artist, is considered the first stencil artist in public spaces
DATE OF BIRTH 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Boulogne-Billancourt , France