I N V D E R

FRENCH B.1969

“What I do and create is more important than who exactly I am.”

Due to the anonymous nature of Invader, little is known about the French street artist’s upbringing or education. The unidentified artist was first brought to the public’s attention in the late 1990’s, when mosaic Space Invaders started to appear on the streets of Paris. Inspired by the 1978 Atari game, Invader’s miniature alien mosaics soon evolved into a whole cast of 8-bit characters that began materialising across the city. Although Invader has always prioritised working in the public space, by the new millennium, the French artist had started exhibiting in both group and solo exhibitions.

His first ever solo exhibition, entitled ‘New Player Insert Coins’, took place in 1999 at Jean Charles de Castelbajac CS, in Paris, France. This was closely followed by ‘Same Player Shoot Again’, which was held the following year at Galerie Almine Rech in Paris. Invader’s reach soon became international as he came to feature in his very first group exhibition outside of Europe, at The Almine Rech Gallery in New York. Since then, Invader has been involved in 15 group exhibitions and the subject of 19 solo exhibitions.

Alongside Invader’s exhibited work, the artist has launched the Space Invaders Project, which endeavours to liberate art from its usual context of museums and institutions. Instead, the artist creates public artwork all around the globe, with the aim of creating at least 20 to 50 works in one city alone. Like the video games from which the characters originate, each creature is awarded a score based on location, intricacy and how difficult it was to install. Invader currently has 4,114 murals across 83 cities. By creating murals all across the world, the earth itself becomes an exhibition and each unique piece a fragment of a tentacular installation.

In 2021, the artist enjoyed an incredibly successful year, with collectors and critics across the globe taking note of his work. According to ArtPrice, Invader’s index doubled from 2020 to 2021, with the median price achieved by his artwork at auction twice that of the previous year. The artist also ‘invaded’ more cities, including Manchester and Marseille, creating new artworks and reasserting his influence on the street art scene.