OK, a little later than I planned, here’s some news on what happened at the Blek le Rat book launch on Wednesday.

For those of you who don’t know Blek’s work, here’s the 101: He’s possibly the street artist whose work genuinely broke fresh ground back in the 1980s – his stencil graffiti of the walls of Paris streets still resonates today, not least in the work of Banksy (who was still at primary school when Blek first started stencilling) – and has equally been a huge influence on graphic design, particularly in music packaging. While street art has grown hugely in popularity over the last decade, Blek is one of the few who can genuinely claim to have been there from the start.

A book has been published about his work from those early days through to the present called Blek le Rat: Getting Through the Walls, written by Blek’s wife, Sybille Prou and King Adz.

A great book needs a great book launch, and The Conran Store in Chelsea was the venue. Starting by creating a stencilled installation on the windows of the store, Blek then signed copies of the book for 300 guests. A genuinely mixed and intriguing crowd – the type you would expect to see in the store on the one hand, the graffiti fans on the other, and everyone else in-between, which just goes to show how far the creative and the talented from both graffiti and street culture scenes can reach these days. And while the venue might feel incongruous at first glance – it was a great choice. Just watch you don’t spill your vodka cocktail or bottle of Asahi over that £3500 Philippe Starck table, mind…

Here are some images from Blek’s creating the installation

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 14:45 and is filed under Books, stencil, art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.