STANSTED.- A series of screenprints by the legend of street art and father of stencil graffiti Xavier Prou, also known as ‘Blek Le Rat’ will be at Sworders’ inaugural print sale on May 24th. A huge influence on graffiti artists worldwide, and particularly Banksy, who stated that every time he thought he painted something slightly original he found out that Blek le Rat had done it as well, only twenty years earlier.

Inspired by the graffiti in New York, Prou returned to France and began his artistic career in 1981 by painting stencils of rats. He used pre-stencilled posters and images allowing the application of paint to be a lot speedier, mostly as he didn’t want to hang around too long because of the police. This was something no one was doing at the time in France. His black painted rats which began to appear on the walls of the city would mark the beginning of the transformation of Paris’s visual landscape and identity.

His pseudonym, Blek le Rat, originates from a childhood cartoon “Blek le Roc”, using “rat” as an anagram for “art” because, for him, the rats symbolized both freedom and the spread of art throughout the city as an invasion.

Shane Xu, who is putting together the first bi-annual sale at the auction house says “Blek Le Rat is an artist who for many years struggled to come to terms with urban art as an acceptable genre and as a result kept a relatively low profile for much of his career. Through obscurity he succeeded in inspiring an artistic revolution”.

The selection of Blek Le Rat prints include The Man That Walks Through Walls which is Blek le Rat’s self-portrait created in 2007. It was first sold at Bonhams in 2008 for its highest estimate £12,000.