Invites will be sent out in the next few days.Īnd to whet your appeitite you can pre-order a copy of Getting Through the Walls here: Doors open 6pm, Thursday, May 8th.The iconic stencils of rats by Blek le Ratīlek began his artwork in 1981, painting stencils of rats on the walls of Paris streets. The show will feature many new works as well as iconic images tracing the history of Bleks career, along with a number of prints available from the gallery on the night. To celebrate the book launch the Black Rat gallery is staging the largest Blek exhibition to date. In recognition of this Thames & Hudson have published a beautifully produced retrospective book entitled, Blek Le Rat: Getting Through the Walls.

This is essentially the blueprint street artists the world over are still reading from today. Blek has always used his art as both a democratic means of bringing the gallery walls to the people and to change the way we interact with the urban spaces around us. Indeed, it was Bleks silhouette stencil of a rat (an image Banksy was later to adopt for Bristol and London) as early as 1981 that broke away from the graffiti political slogans and injected it with a fresh new language of political art. Banksy is on record as saying that, ∾very time I think Ive painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek LeRat has done it as well. Almost all of whom arrived a whole generation after Blek started hitting the streets of Paris back in the early eighties.

Considered to be the father of stencil street art, Blek Le Rat (aka Xavier Prou) has had a profound influence on todays current crop of street artists.

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