Blek le Rat worked consistently through the 1990s and 2000s. When French police revealed his birth name after arresting him in 1991, he has been arrested and harassed by police in the US, Argentina and the UK. Despite the enormous role he played in 1980s and 1990s street art, Blek le Rat has kept a relatively low profile throughout most of his career to avoid prison time and fines. He set the stage for an artistic revolution through years of absolute obscurity.

Blek Le Rat (Xavier Prou) was born in Paris in 1951. He is a grand master of street art and considered by many to be the originator of stencil graffiti. Blek has been adorning the streets of Paris with his hugely original and intelligent artwork since the early eighties, and he has been a massive influence on today’s graffiti and guerrilla art movements.

He started decorating the streets of Paris in 1981 with a rat stencil, hoping to create an invasion of rats in the city. He was inspired to create this stencil after seeing the graffiti in New York in the 70’s, but he didn’t just want to copy the American style he wanted to create a style that suited Paris and so he chose the stencil as he saw this something very Latin. After the rats he moved onto using life sizes portraits. The fist of these was an old man wearing glasses and screaming. Blek has now painted on walls all over the world and has influenced a whole generation of street artists. He was a pioneer of stencil graffiti and one of the first artist to move to using a symbol rather than his name as his tag.

Blek le rat created his mane from a cartoon strip he used to read as a child ‘Blek le Rock’. He changed the ‘le Rock’ to ‘le Rat’ because his first stencil was a rat and because you can find art in rat. He no longer paints on walls after in 1991 he was tried for ten years worth of graffiti and had to pay substantial fines, and would face jail if caught again. He continues to produce work but now it is in the form of posters rather than painting directly on walls. Blek le rat lives in an abandoned 10th Century castle somewhere in France with his wife and teenage son.

Blek le Rat (Xavier Prou), born in Paris 56 years ago, studied painting and architecture and was the first street artist to use the life-sized stencil. His main motivations are political and social consciousness and the desire to bring art to the people. His art, like Banksy’s, is playful, political and often provocative. In fact, Blek le Rat is the archetypal enfant terrible, undermining the establishment with his risqué imagery. He began his artwork in 1981, painting stencils of rats on the street walls of Paris, describing the rat as ‘the only free animal in the city’ and one which ‘spreads the plague everywhere, just like street art’.

This year he has had shows in London and New York and a major monograph Blek le Rat—Getting Through the Walls, published by Thames and Hudson, documents his artistic career over the past twenty-five years.