Four street artists making prints and multiples

‘Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing’ — Banksy

The act of leaving an indelible mark in a public space goes back to the invention of writing — but graffiti as we think of it today emerged in New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia in the 1960s and 1970s. Using cans of spray paint and marker pens, artists began ‘tagging’ their pseudonyms or invented logos on buildings and trains in a bid to make their voices heard in an increasingly urban world.

The movement had three key principles. Work was made to exist outside the boundaries of the law and be accessible to everyone, so nobody could buy it or own it; it had to risk being ephemeral, as anyone could tear it down or cover it up; and it should have an agenda, whether that was promoting the artist’s name, or expressing their aspirations or frustrations.

As a rebellious act, street art was championed by the founding figures of hip-hop, and during the following decade, it became the culture’s unofficial aesthetic, evolving from graffiti to encompass stencils, sculptures and interventions.

Pioneers of the movement include Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, both of whom blended graffiti’s roots with contemporary art practices, developing a unique visual vocabulary and eventually trading brick for canvas and taking their street art into the gallery, museum and auction house. It’s a transition that artists are still making today, from Banksy to KAWS, taking the energy of a raw, iconoclastic, underground art form to the mainstream, and challenging the status quo of ‘high art’.

Thierry Noir (b. 1958)

In 1982, aged 23, Thierry Noir bought a one-way ticket from Lyon to Berlin, on a mission to become an artist. Two years later, in a revolutionary act that foreshadowed the landmark’s downfall, he became the first artist to paint murals on stretches of the Berlin Wall, marking black lines and blocks of vibrant colour with a roller to form stylised faces.

Before long, people started asking Noir for portable versions of his pictures, and he began painting on canvas and making prints. The German filmmaker Wim Wenders introduced him to the rock band U2, who commissioned him to create the artwork for their 1991 album Achtung Baby.

In 2023, Christie’s in London hosted Thierry Noir: Techno, an immersive exhibition dedicated to the artist’s love of dance music. Organised in conjunction with fabric, the legendary nightclub, it explored the way Noir’s hypnotic visual language mirrors the pulsating beats of techno. Several works depicted DJs in action — reflecting the artist’s five-metre-high work The Stoke Newington DJ, which was painted on the side of a house in north-east London in 2016.

Noir’s other public works adorn the walls of an office block in Los Angeles, a fish shop in Tokyo, a former jelly factory in Sydney and the entire exterior of a private museum in the Austrian Alps. Some of his most recent series include ‘Gold’, inspired by sport, and ‘Mount Fuji’, a set of ukiyo-e prints on paper made by Ichibei Iwano, a Japanese master paper-maker and ‘Living National Treasure’.

Noir’s market has really taken off in the past five or so years. Now in his late sixties, his output is at its most prolific.

Invader (b. 1969)

In the 1990s, Invader began to install sets of ceramic tiles arranged to resemble the four characters from the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders in public spaces around Paris. They soon spread to other towns and cities in France, then Europe and the world — with an ever-expanding repertoire of images.

To date, over 4,000 have been affixed to buildings, billboards and bridges in more than 80 cities. Each work’s location is logged online and given an accessibility score out of 100, allowing admirers to compete in documenting their encounters. So far, more than 40 million pictures have been recorded by the public. Sites of installation range from 4,000 metres above sea level to eight metres underwater — and one work was blasted into space in 2015.

Since 2000, Invader has been producing ‘aliases’ of his public works and selling them through authorised galleries. He has also created images of cultural icons such as the Dalai Lama, Jack Nicholson in The Shining and David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash from pieces of Rubik’s Cube — coining the term ‘Rubikcubism’ to describe the style. In addition, collectors can acquire Invader prints, multiples, do-it-yourself mosaic kits and guides that detail the locations of his works in different cities.

STIK (b. 1979)

STIK started to gain attention in the 2000s, spray-painting instantly recognisable stick figures consisting of just six lines and two dots around east London. In 2011, he held his first gallery show, and the following year collaborated with Dulwich Picture Gallery, painting a series of murals around south London that reimagined Old Master paintings from the museum’s collection in his own style. Around the same time, he also began creating prints and multiples.

Universal in their simplicity, his works have covered walls in Germany, Japan, Jordan and Norway. Many are intended as beacons of hope: Big Mother, which at 125ft high was Britain’s tallest mural, protested against the demolition of social housing in London (before itself being demolished); and Sleeping Baby was painted as a mural at Homerton Hospital in Hackney, and was then issued as a print to raise funds for the NHS trust. ‘The NHS is our baby,’ said the artist. ‘It is very vulnerable, and we the people need to take care of it.’ As part of the fundraising effort, Christie’s sold a set of four prints of the image in 2016.

STIK’s auction record was set at Christie’s in 2020 with Holding Hands, a maquette for a public sculpture of the same name in London’s Hoxton Square. It realised £287,500, with the proceeds funding outdoor artworks around Hackney. A gift set of five lithographs of the hand-holding figures is one of several works by the artist offered in Contemporary Edition: London.

Other popular STIK images include Walk, Lovers and Onbu, which is also known as ‘Piggyback’ and was made in 2013 at Japan’s Adachi Foundation — a society for the preservation of traditional woodcut printing techniques, where Thierry Noir also made his ‘Mount Fuji’ series in 2025.

Christiaan Nagel (b. 1982)

Christiaan Nagel didn’t have any international auction records until about three years ago. Then, in April 2025, Christie’s offered one of the artist’s bronze mushroom sculptures with a low estimate of £500. It sold for over £10,000. Titled Meta Mushroom (Pink), the luminous sculpture mounted on a granite base is a painted bronze version of the vividly coloured polyurethane mushrooms that the South African artist has been installing in various cities for more than a decade. Usually sprouting from seemingly inaccessible places, they have appeared in New York, Barcelona, Cape Town, Berlin, Los Angeles and London.

‘The mushrooms have brought together three worlds for me,’ the artist has said. ‘That of a child and his or her imagination; mushroom clouds, war and conflict; and psychoactive drugs.’

The smaller bronze versions were developed in the artist’s studio in 2023. They are produced in six colours — including pink, blue and yellow — in editions of three, and come with a signed letter of authenticity.

The market

Many artists who have their roots in creating public works on the street are now fully established in the mainstream art world, and therefore the market treats Prints and Multiples by these artists in the same way as it would treat such works by anyone else. Recognisable images tend to command the highest prices. Other significant factors include the quality and condition of a work, whether or not it is signed, and the size of the edition. Some artists might also produce variants in different colourways, particular examples of which could be rarer or have a personal — or viral — appeal.

As street art continues to grow in popularity, so the collector base is expanding: it is no longer an underground scene. And because street art is site-specific, prints and multiples offer a great way to have access to an artist’s work and to feel a part of the movement.

Contemporary Edition: London is live for bidding online until 31 March 2026, and on view until 31 March at Christie’s in London