The leading street artist of the 21st century
An Anonymous Street Artist.
b. 1969
Invader
In the late 1990s, anonymous French artist Invader began cementing and gluing ceramic mosaic Space Invaders—pixelated characters from the eponymous 1978 video game—across the streets of Paris. He expanded his roster to include Pac-Man ghosts and other popular 8-bit characters, and his works now adorn cities around the world, from Los Angeles to Kathmandu. Along with these clandestine works of street art, Invader has produced mosaics on Perspex panel, plywood, and book covers. He has also created paintings, drawings, and screen prints in his signature pixelated style. These works regularly sell for six figures on the secondary market. In 2019, astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti brought one of Invader’s works to the International Space Station, about 248 miles above Earth. Invader has exhibited internationally, with shows in Los Angeles, Paris, Brussels, and Hong Kong, among other cities.
Filters
9 products
About the artist
Self-described ‘Unidentified Free Artist,’ the anonymous French street artist Invader is internationally known for his pixelated tile mosaics. Concealing his identity with a pseudonym, the artist always appears behind a mask. Invader’s work of pixelated tile mosaics have been installed in cities across the world.
Invader's early biography shows he was born in Paris, France in 1969, adopting his name from the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders. Everything about Invader's identity remains unknown, and nobody has ever seen his face. He claims that ‘as such, I can visit my own exhibitions without any visitors knowing who I really am even if I stand a few steps away from them.’ Invader is a graduate from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and has pursued his famous Space Invaders project in Paris, staging global ‘invasions’ in cities across the world since the 90s.
Early Works
Invader’s first mosaic installation appeared near the Place de la Bastille in Paris in 1996, but it was not until 1998 that the Space Invaders project began. The first ‘invasion’ appeared as a pixelated character from the 1978 Atari game Space Invaders, made from small, ceramic, square tiles, and was inserted into a street wall in Paris. It is now covered by a coat of paint and is impossible to find today.
The artist describes the Space Invaders as ‘the perfect icons of our time, a time where digital technologies are the heartbeat of our world.’ Soon after this first installation, Invader began his ‘invasion waves’ across the globe and went on to ‘occupy’ 31 cities throughout France and 65 cities in over 30 countries.
Anonymity
Invader has remained anonymous throughout his entire career and little is known of his personal life and biography. Notoriously, he has been arrested several times for his public installations and has even been banned from certain countries that he has ‘invaded.’ He was arrested in 2011 at Little Tokyo’s building in Los Angeles, before MOCA gallery’s Art In The Streets exhibition, where his work appeared.
The artist has featured in the acclaimed Banksy documentary 'Exit Through The Gift Shop,' claiming to be the cousin of the film’s protagonist Thierry Guetta, aka Mr. Brainwash.
Influence
A key influence on Invader’s practice is the concept of the ‘ready-made’ that stems from the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp. Invader brings the notion of the ‘ready-made’ into contemporary public spaces by lifting the Space Invader motif directly from the developer Taito’s video game and turning it into street art.
Invader has explained that Taito have contacted him throughout his career without facing issues around the use of their image, claiming that ‘I work with them, not against them.’
Prints and Multiples
Invader has been making collectables since the early 2000s, shortly after he began creating street art. Like Keith Haring’s Pop Shop, Invader had a store where he offered items like Invasion Kits and also released limited-edition screenprints to coincide with his gallery exhibitions.
Invader is an excellent artist for first-time art investors because his price points are much more accessible than other artists in the street art or urban art categories.
Contact Us
Do you have any question? Or looking for a particular work?
Get in touch with the team and we will do our best to support you in your collecting journey.,