This paper explores the persistence and ubiquitous spread of the stencil as a vehicle for mass–produced street art, made especially popular through the iconic work of British street-artist Banksy. At the other extreme are the stencil-cutters, who by comparison are regarded within the peer community of the subculture, as lesser writers, relying on craft skills that are held to be quaint, even fraudulent. At the apex are those writers who create the imposing wildstyle exhibition pieces, large-scale vivid inscriptions that require a high degree of graphic invention and daring. If you don’ t have an invite for the show tonight you can always pop along to the London Graphic Centre in Covent Garden.Contemporary graffiti artists, or ‘writers’ as they are known, observe a strict hierarchy that self-ranks ambition, daring and calligraphic innovation. The show will feature many new works as well as iconic images tracing the history of Blek’s career, along with a number of prints. To celebrate the book launch the Black Rat Gallery is staging the largest Blek exhibition to date. In recognition of this Thames & Hudson have published a retrospective book entitled, Blek Le Rat: Getting Through the Walls. This is essentially the blueprint street artists the world over are still reading from today. Blek has always used his art as both a democratic means of bringing the gallery walls to the people and to change the way we interact with the urban spaces around us. It was Blek’s silhouette stencil of a rat (an image Banksy was later to adopt for Bristol and London) in 1981 that broke away from the graffiti political slogans and injected it with a fresh new language of political art. Banksy is on record as saying that, “Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek LeRat has done it as well.
Almost all of whom arrived a whole generation after Blek started hitting the streets of Paris back in the early eighties.
Considered to be the father of stencil street art, Blek Le Rat (aka Xavier Prou) has had a profound influence on today’s current crop of street artists.
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