Street art in Paris

Where stencil art began

In 1981 Blek le Rat started spraying stencilled rats onto Paris walls and is often called the father of stencil graffiti – Banksy has named him as an influence. From 1985 Miss.Tic stencilled self-confident women with short, poetic lines in Montmartre and the Butte-aux-Cailles; she died in 2022, and her figures are still part of the city's memory. Jef Aérosol's giant stencilled self-portrait Chuuuttt!!! (2011) looks down on Place Igor-Stravinsky next to the Centre Pompidou.

Mosaics, paste-ups and giant walls

Since 1998 Invader has placed small Space Invader mosaics on Paris walls – and later in cities around the world; with the FlashInvaders app, people collect them like a game. The Paris-born photographer JR started with huge paste-up portraits in the suburbs and later made the Louvre pyramid seem to disappear (2016). André Saraiva's top-hatted Mr. A has smiled from Paris shutters since 1989, C215 paints stencil portraits of passers-by, many of them in Vitry-sur-Seine, and Seth paints dreamlike murals of children from Paris to the rest of the world.

Graffiti writing came to Paris too – partly from New York itself. JonOne (John Andrew Perello), born in Harlem in 1963, founded the crew 156 All Starz in 1984 and moved to Paris in 1987 at the invitation of the writer Bando. At the Hôpital Éphémère squat he painted alongside A-One, Sharp, Ash, Jayone and Skki, and turned graffiti into large abstract canvases of layered colour and tags. In 2007 his painting Match Point (1993) sold at Artcurial for €24,800, then the highest price paid for a graffiti work in France; since 2013 he has also designed rugs with Boccara.

Where to see it

• Belleville – especially rue Dénoyez, where the walls change almost weekly.
• Butte-aux-Cailles – the village in the 13th arrondissement, home of Miss.Tic's stencils.
• 13th arrondissement – monumental murals on housing blocks, including Shepard Fairey's Marianne «Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité», created with Galerie Itinerrance.
• Canal de l'Ourcq – long walls along the water in the north-east.
• Vitry-sur-Seine – a suburb with hundreds of works, many by C215.
• Fluctuart – a floating urban art centre on the Seine, opened in 2019.

Galleries, auctions and the market

Paris has a dense network of galleries for urban art. Galerie Itinerrance in the 13th arrondissement organised the legendary Tour Paris 13 in 2013 – a whole building filled with street art before it was demolished. Magda Danysz and Mathgoth are other well-known addresses, and the auction house Artcurial holds dedicated urban art sales. That makes Paris one of the few cities where street art is traded as regularly as contemporary art.

For collectors, the rules are the same as everywhere: studio works, signed editions and documented provenance count – pieces on walls cannot be bought. Prices range from a few hundred euros for signed prints by younger artists to far higher sums for established names; André Saraiva's auction record, for example, is $42,311 (2022). For a first idea of what your piece is worth, use our free estimate from a photo.