Invader Sent A Mosaic Into Space
Invader is the pseudonym of the enigmatic French street artist whose real name is believed by some sources to be Franck Slama. Since his initial creations began to appear in Paris in the 1990s, Invader’s pixelated, pop culture inspired mosaics have steadily grown in popularity, and he is now widely regarded as one of the most influential street artists of our time.
Prices paid for Invader’s work have grown exponentially in recent years, and he is especially popular in France and the United Kingdom. Though his art most frequently takes the form of street mosaics, Invader works in a number of different mediums, including printmaking. In fact, prints account for 48% of his work sold at auction, and most sell for between £1,000 and £5,000, though they can fetch far higher prices.
Below is a list of Invader’s five most expensive prints sold at auction. To find out more about how much your Invader print might be worth, or how to sell it, get in touch with Mark Littler today.
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Half Phantom
Invader’s most common subjects are the aliens from the classic 1978 arcade video game, Space Invaders, which the artist played growing up, and which inspired his pseudonym. However, Invader has also been influenced by other video games from the ‘70s and ‘80s, including Pac-Man. This print from 2003 is clearly inspired by the colourful ghosts who act as the main antagonists in Pac-Man, and it was sold by Digard Auction in October 2019 for £33,073.
Half Phantom sold by Digard Auction in 2019
Aladdin Sane (Pinky)
David Bowie’s 1973 Aladdin Sane has become one of the most recognised albums in the world, partly due to the striking cover artwork featuring an ethereal, deathly-pale Bowie with closed eyes and a blue-and-red lightning bolt dividing his face in two. Given Bowie’s interest in aliens and outer-space, it should come as no surprise that Invader paid homage to him in a series of screenprints; after all, the artist’s passion for all things extraterrestrial even led him to launch one of his own mosaics into space.
Invader’s screenprints transformed the Bowie from Aladdin Sane into differently-coloured Pac-Man ghosts, retaining the iconic lightning bolt, and playing on the musician’s famous dual-coloured eyes (the result of a fist fight as a teenager). Four of the prints were created based on the original pink, orange, blue, and yellow ghosts from Pac-Man, and another two in silver and gold were each released in a smaller run of limited edition prints. This pink version quadrupled its top estimate when it was sold by SBI Art Auction in May 2022 for £17,472.
Invasion (Silver)
Although Invader has since expanded his repertoire to include various subjects from pop culture (such as the Pink Panther, Star Wars characters, and Spider-Man), he began his artistic career with the eponymous space invaders from the 1978 video game. They remain one of his most frequent mosaic subjects to this day, popping up in different cities around the world during the artist’s so called “invasions”, in which he targets a particular city and quickly displays “20 to 50 pieces”.
In his own words, these invasions are “about liberating Art from its usual alienators that museums or institutions can be. But it is also about freeing the Space Invaders from their video games”. Indeed, the pixelated space invaders remain among the artist’s most popular motifs in both mosaics and print; this 2009 serigraph, for instance, was sold by Digard Auction in October 2021 for £17,301, nearly £5,000 above its estimate.
Invasion (Silver) sold by Digard Auction in 2021
Sunset (Blue and Green GID)
This serigraph in colours was created in 2018 and sold by Artcurial for £16,261 in December 2020, more than double its estimated value. Invader’s prints regularly exceed their estimates, particularly in more recent auctions as a result of the artist’s ever-increasing fame.
This newfound fame has come with its own problems, though; Invader’s work is now so highly sought-after that some of his street mosaics have been, in his own words, “removed, damaged, or destroyed by individuals who seek to resell them.” Usually, this results in the significant accidental damage of the mosaics, and the artist has stated he hopes “this nonsense and painful destruction will [soon] stop.”
Invasion (Silver) sold by Digard Auction in 2021
Invaded Scream
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s best-known work is undoubtedly his 1893 painting, The Scream, and its various other iterations. The beautiful yet harrowing image is now an icon in popular culture, and it has been widely copied, parodied, and reworked in various forms. In 2011, Invader joined the ranks of those inspired by The Scream, and he used Munch’s lithographic version of the image as the basis for his own artwork which, of course, involved space invaders.
Invader’s print was sold by Digard Auction in October 2021 for £16,035, over £4,000 more than its top estimate. With ranks of sinister, crude space invaders descending through the sky in serried ranks toward the tortured central figure, the print can be viewed as a comment on the nature of video games, the human condition, and the world today. In many ways, it is exemplary of the street artist’s belief that space invaders “are the perfect icons of our time, a time where digital technologies are the heartbeat of our world.”
Invaded Scream sold by Digard Auction in 2021
