Blek le Rat
Put the first stencils on the walls of Paris in 1981, and everything stencilled since has followed.
Blek le Rat is Xavier Prou, born in Paris in 1951 and trained in painting and architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1981 he began spraying small stencilled rats across Paris — chosen, he has said, because the rat is the only free animal in the city and because the word is an anagram of art — and in doing so effectively invented stencil graffiti as a form. Life-size stencilled figures followed: the man carrying a suitcase, the beggar, the sheep, the reworkings of Caravaggio and of Michelangelo's David. His influence on the generation that followed is not disputed and has been acknowledged in print by Banksy.
Three quite different things trade under the name and are regularly confused. There are published screenprints, generally signed and numbered in editions; there are unique or hand-finished spray and stencil works on canvas, board or paper, where the number of colours and passes of the stencil is the thing to record; and there are panels and doors taken from the street, where provenance is everything and legality is sometimes a live question. A certificate from the artist or the publisher is the normal reference, and it should name the edition and the date.
If you own a work by Blek le Rat
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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