5 things to know about Invader

Invader has been using the ancient technique of assembling small, ceramic tiles to create pixelated public art for almost three decades. His most famous recurring motifs are the four characters from the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders — Squid, Octopus, Crab and U.F.O. — but other designs include cartoon characters, insects and slot-machine fruits.

As of September 2024, a total of 4,201 of his mosaics have ‘invaded’ the walls of some 80 cities, from Paris to London, New York and Tokyo, where they’re on view to millions — knowingly or not.

The highest is placed 4,000 metres above sea level, in Potosí, Bolivia, whilst the lowest is eight metres underwater, attached to a sunken sculpture off the coast of Cancún in Mexico.

Others have appeared on the ‘D’ of the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, the front page of a French newspaper, the lapel of a jacket worn by former president Jacques Chirac, and the desk of a police station where he spent the night in a cell. Invader’s works have even been to outer space: one was attached to a weather balloon, while another travelled on board the International Space Station.

The artist — whose real identity remains a mystery — was born near Paris in 1969. After graduating from the capital’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he experimented with painting and film-making, before settling on mosaics. ‘I said to myself, “Everything you’re doing, there are other people who are already doing it.” With mosaic, you can bring something new,’ he reflected in a recent profile in The New Yorker.

After discovering Paris’s exploding street-art scene in the 1990s, Invader began fixing his works to the city’s walls, tunnels, metro stations and monuments — an act legally classified in France as vandalism and punishable by jail. In 1998, his first active year, he created no fewer than 147 mosaics around the city, meticulously logging each one with a title that denotes its location and sequence number, as well as a score rating the ‘invasion’s’ success out of 100.

In 2010, hiding behind a gas mask, Invader appeared in the acclaimed Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop as the famous cousin of the film’s protagonist Thierry Guetta, aka Mr. Brainwash.

Invader’s success didn’t happen overnight. His first show, at the Castelbajac concept store in Paris, failed to sell a single work. Eventually, however, he began to build a cult following, and in 2014 he released an app called FlashInvaders, which invites fans to photograph — or ‘flash’ — his works in situ.

So far, more than 400,000 players have flashed over 28 million images, with new uploads appearing every few seconds. The highest-ranking player (rumoured to be a pilot who schedules his routes specifically to chase discoveries) has so far visited 3,468 of Invader’s artworks around the world.

Between February and May 2024, following encouragement from Damien Hirst to keep producing more work, Invader held his largest exhibition to date. Spanning 37,000 square feet, spread over nine floors, the former headquarters of the newspaper Libération were turned into Invader Space Station, displaying hundreds of sculptures, photographs, videos and installations by the artist.

But possibly his biggest institutional coup occurred in 1998, when Invader claims to have surreptitiously placed 10 of his artworks on the walls of the Louvre, which he says temporarily made him the only living artist to have work hanging in the museum.

Over time, Invader has taken measures to stop his work being stolen, including placing the mosaics higher up on buildings, employing stronger adhesives and baking the tiles in such a way that they crumble if anyone tries to remove them.

Since 2000, he has created ‘aliases’ — authorised doubles, offered through galleries, of certain works that were originally part of a city ‘invasion’. Each comes with an identity card that guarantees its authenticity, which slots into its Perspex base.

In 2019, an alias of a mosaic of the Japanese manga character Astro Boy, which first appeared in Tokyo and is called TK_119, sold at auction for $1.2 million, smashing its $100,000 low estimate and setting the artist’s record price.

Invader also produces portraits of cultural icons created from Rubik’s cubes (the footballer Kylian Mbappé commissioned one depicting Pelé), spearheading a movement he terms ‘Rubikcubism’.

Christie’s Prints and Multiples specialist James Baskerville points out that, in addition, collectors can acquire Invader prints, multiples, limited-edition Invasion Packs (containing a mosaic along with instructions on how to assemble it) and Invasion Guides (detailing the locations of his works in various cities). Some of the rarest versions of these guides even have mosaic works glued to their front covers.

‘People tend to resonate with the image more than the medium, though,’ adds the specialist. ‘The most sought-after works are usually those that depict video games, followed by others that reference aspects of popular culture such as iconic movies, music and Pop art.’

The Avant-Garde(s) Including Thinking Italian sale at Christie’s in Paris takes place on 18 October 2024, with the 20/21 Century Art — Day Sale following on 19 October. Explore Christie’s 20th/21st Century autumn sale season in London and Paris, until 22 October