Invader: Biography & Artwork

Self-described ‘Unidentified Free Artist,’ the anonymous French street artist Invader is internationally known for his pixelated tile mosaics. Concealing his identity with a pseudonym, the artist always appears behind a mask. Invader’s work of pixelated tile mosaics have been installed in cities across the world.

Invader's early biography shows he was born in Paris, France in 1969, adopting his name from the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders. Everything about Invader's identity remains unknown, and nobody has ever seen his face. He claims that ‘as such, I can visit my own exhibitions without any visitors knowing who I really am even if I stand a few steps away from them.’ Invader is a graduate from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and has pursued his famous Space Invaders project in Paris, staging global ‘invasions’ in cities across the world since the 90s.

‘Invading’ cities worldwide, the Space Invaders project has come to be one of the most widely recognised street art stunts in art history. Invader’s pixelated video game characters are more popular than ever, and thousands of people rush to the streets every time the artist announces a new wave of invasion.

Due to his growing following, Invader has begun to document the Space Invaders project through an online map of the location of his works entitled ‘World Invasion’, found on the artist’s website. With his success, Invader’s practice has expanded to take place in many unusual places. One Space Invader artwork can be found under the sea at the bottom of Cancun Bay, and another in the International Space Station, at 248 miles altitude. To counter a wave of thefts that saw his Space Invaders damaged by people attempting to steal them, in 2018 the artist launched his popular Invasion Kits. The kits contain mosaic tiles that allow their owners to create their own Invader mosaic from home and have become a sought-after collectible piece.

Since the early 2000s, Invader's art has expanded from its original motif of the Space Invader into new icons inspired by other 8-bit video games like Pac-man, as well as figures like the Pink Panther, Spider-Man and Popeye. Since 2004, Invader has also experimented outside the universe of video games and has created a series of works for indoor display using Rubik’s Cubes, which he refers to as ‘Rubikcubism.’ Now an extremely popular piece of art, Invader’s Rubikcubes have further solidified Invader’s reputation as a trailblazing icon.

Invader’s first mosaic installation appeared near the Place de la Bastille in Paris in 1996, but it was not until 1998 that the Space Invaders project began. The first ‘invasion’ appeared as a pixelated character from the 1978 Atari game Space Invaders, made from small, ceramic, square tiles, and was inserted into a street wall in Paris. It is now covered by a coat of paint and is impossible to find today.

The artist describes the Space Invaders as ‘the perfect icons of our time, a time where digital technologies are the heartbeat of our world.’ Soon after this first installation, Invader began his ‘invasion waves’ across the globe and went on to ‘occupy’ 31 cities throughout France and 65 cities in over 30 countries.

A key influence on Invader’s practice is the concept of the ‘ready-made’ that stems from the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp. Invader brings the notion of the ‘ready-made’ into contemporary public spaces by lifting the Space Invader motif directly from the developer Taito’s video game and turning it into street art.

Invader has explained that Taito have contacted him throughout his career without facing issues around the use of their image, claiming that ‘I work with them, not against them.’

Invader has remained anonymous throughout his entire career and little is known of his personal life and biography. Notoriously, he has been arrested several times for his public installations and has even been banned from certain countries that he has ‘invaded.’ He was arrested in 2011 at Little Tokyo’s building in Los Angeles, before MOCA gallery’s Art In The Streets exhibition, where his work appeared.

The artist has featured in the acclaimed Banksy documentary 'Exit Through The Gift Shop,' claiming to be the cousin of the film’s protagonist Thierry Guetta, aka Mr. Brainwash.

A visual tribute to iconic Japanese manga series Astro Boy, Tk_119 (2014) blew its sale estimate out of the park at Sotheby’s New York in November 2019, realising a total of US$1,220,000. The work by Parisian street artist and king of the mosaic, Invader, constitutes an instantly-recognisable re-appropriation of popular visual culture that makes use of the artist’s signature material: the humble tile.

A graduate of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Invader is known for placing his works in situ. A version of this particular work once adorned the underside of a railway bridge in the Japanese capital, Tokyo.

Comprising 391 segments of Rubik’s Cubes, Rubik Space (2005) is one of Invader’s most significant mosaics. First exhibited in Spring 2005 at the exhibition Rubik Space, held at Galerie Patricia Dorfmann in Paris’s 4th arrondissement, it is the second work by the artist involving the use of the Rubik’s Cube – an iconic 1980s puzzle game well-known across the world for its 54 brightly-coloured squares.

With a sale estimate located between €400,000 and €600,000, the piece – which the artist describes as a ‘tableau-object’ or ‘object painting’ – realised €492,600 at Artcurial, Paris in December of 2020.

Reminiscent of Jeff Koons’s artful interventions in the annals of art history, Rubik Mona Lisa sees street artist Invader turn his hand to a veritable icon of the Italian Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci’s internationally-recognisable painting, the Mona Lisa.

Obfuscating the surface of the revered painting only slightly, the work is one of Invader’s more complex pieces. Comprising an assemblage of tiles taken from the similarly iconic 1980s puzzle, the Rubik’s Cube, the work exceeded its sale estimate of €120,000-€150,000, realising a total of €480,000 in February 2020 at Artcurial auction house in the artist’s native Paris.