Blek le Rat valuation
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.
What a work by Blek le Rat is worth
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 is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
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.
Paper posters, and the homeless series
In 1991 Blek was arrested in Paris while stencilling a copy of a Caravaggio Madonna and Child, and since then he has worked mostly with stencilled paper posters pasted onto walls, which are quicker to put up. In 2006 he began a series of images of homeless people, standing, sitting or lying on the pavement, to draw attention to homelessness.
His influence on later stencil artists has been widely acknowledged, Banksy among them. For a work on paper or canvas, a signature, the date and the gallery's documentation identify it, and a pasted poster taken from a wall should have its history set down as fully as possible.
Blek le Roc, Leipzig and the Mission District
Xavier Prou was born on 15 November 1951 at Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western edge of Paris. A visit to New York in 1971 showed him subway graffiti, but he chose a manner he thought better suited to Paris, and he has named the Canadian artist Richard Hambleton, who painted large human figures in the 1980s, as another influence. The name comes from the comic Blek le Roc. In 1985 he was at the first gathering of the graffiti and urban art movement at Bondy, organised by the collective Vive La Peinture.
His oldest surviving street work is a 1991 copy of Caravaggio's Madonna di Loreto, dedicated to Sybille, who became his wife, which was found behind posters on a house wall in Leipzig in 2012. In 2011 he added to a mural Banksy had begun the year before in the Mission District of San Francisco. Many of his figures are lone individuals set against larger, oppressive groups.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
