100 artistes du street art: A Comprehensive Survey by Paul Ardenne and Marie Maertens

Published by Les presses du réel, the book '100 artistes du street art' by Paul Ardenne and Marie Maertens offers a broad overview of street art through profiles of one hundred creators from diverse origins and generations. In his introductory text, Ardenne traces the origins of street art, noting that while Mexican and American muralists of the 1930s worked on official commissions, a more clandestine form of mural painting emerged with the protest movements of the late 1960s, aided by the commercial availability of spray cans. During the 1970s, graffiti flourished in the United States—producing artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring—and then spread worldwide. Today, 'street art' encompasses a wide range of practices: pictorial (Banksy, Maya Hayuk, Ikon), viral (Invader's mosaic aliens, Zevs's bloody drips under corporate logos), photographic (JR's large-format faces), laser-based (Evan Roth's tags), and acrobatic (São Paulo's pixações that scale buildings). Increasingly, street art has moved into three dimensions, leaving the wall to occupy urban space with poetic, often discreet interventions, such as Slinkachu's tiny figurines placed in puddles.