{"id":11710,"date":"2022-04-28T09:24:20","date_gmt":"2022-04-28T09:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/?post_type=artist&p=11710"},"modified":"2026-04-02T08:49:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T08:49:08","slug":"kriki","status":"publish","type":"artist","link":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/artists\/kriki\/","title":{"rendered":"Kriki"},"content":{"rendered":"

KRIKI<\/strong> (real name Christian Vall\u00e9e) is a French artist born in Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1965. Currently lives and works in Paris.<\/p>\n

The art critic Jean-Luc Chalumeau, author of numerous works on contemporary art, writes in the preface to Kriki’s monograph: “Founder, in 1984, of the group of visual artists Nukl\u00e9-Art and of the electro-punk music group Les Invahisseurs, Kriki still embodies punk culture in contemporary French art today. From 1984, the street with its stencils will be his art school, as well as the metro and its hacks of advertising displays. As a result, he participated in the foundation and emergence of what is now called Street Art. Immersed in alternative culture, his youthful avant-garde will immediately place him at the top of emerging artists to follow both in galleries and on the art market\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

Right from the start, Kriki covered the capital’s palisades and walls with the famous stencil “Hello Olga, There’s a stencil to erase” (Olga being the graffiti remover for the cleanliness department of the City of Paris). Immersed in alternative culture, Kriki participated from 1985 in the 2 km of wild frescoes that would awaken the industrial wastelands of the Canal de l’Ourcq. In 1986, the artist joined forces with Editions Parall\u00e8les for the publication of \u201cPochoirs \u00e0 la Une\u201d, which has now become the essential reference for stencil and Street Art pioneers. That same year, he took part in the historic sale \u201cYoung people landed\u201d under the hammer of Master Binoche, alongside, among others, Keith Haring and Futura 2000.<\/p>\n

From the outset, Kriki was identified as one of the emblematic figures of young French painting of the 80s. He participated in the emergence and foundation of Urban Art, long before the art world heard of Banksy. Nevertheless, Kriki belongs to this generational sensibility of the Free Figuration movement, of which he will contribute to its revitalization. Very soon after his “breaking and entering” into art, as he says himself, Kriki finds himself exhibiting alongside Wim Delvoye, Keith Haring, or Basquiat in galleries as famous as Guy Pieters Gallery (Knokke-Le -Zoute), Il Capricorno (Venice), and Enrico Navarra (Paris); or to participate in the very first exhibitions of today’s prestigious Parisian galleries such as J\u00e9r\u00f4me de Noirmont, Kamel Mennour, or even today Suzanne Tarasi\u00e8ve exhibiting Immendorff and Baselitz…<\/p>\n

At 23, Kriki, a tutelary figure in Urban Art, will already have his first Solo Show at the FIAC, immediately imposing an immediately identifiable style on the international scene, making him one of the major young artists of his generation. In 1985, Kriki invented a character, the Fuzz, half-robot, half-polymorphic fetish, omnipresent, a real brand affixed, and of which the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris will produce an edition. This interest in the now iconic Fuzz will be relayed by the Maison Louis Vuitton, which, through ongoing sponsorship, will allow the realization of a large-scale project on the Fuzz and be presented at the Galerie Kamel Mennour in 2000. After many metamorphoses, the Fuzz and the figures that accompany it will reappear in the paintings in the form of viruses contaminating the history of art.<\/p>\n

Today more than ever, Kriki’s work reveals worlds constructed by multiple cultural references made of the sedimentation of affects that punctuate his life as an artist. Indeed, Kriki mixes his universes, not hesitating inside complex architectures to connect between them characters of African masquerades with pompadours wearing sneakers, as well as breaker dancers with domestic robots. All his figures draw their identities from African rites, but also from Western classical art, Hip Hop culture, as well as robotics, in particular with the android Topo, a home automation guardian. As a result, this over-manipulation of original images from which his paintings come provokes a certain resistance to our first attempt at reading. Ernest Van Buyender, president of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (Muhka) wrote \u201cKriki is the only French artist whose originality and ambition in his painting can be understood as a bridge between Subculture and Haute culture\u201d. Kriki’s painting is that of hyper-connectivity, with jacks and other connection cables which, like so many energy flows, network his visionary worlds where his own aesthetic language joins a universal language.<\/p>\n

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Kriki’s works<\/h3>\n

Kriki’s work is present in important and prestigious public and private collections: Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, Museum of Art and History \/ Belfort, Inka Bank \/ Geneva, Peter Stuyvesant Foundation \/ Amsterdam , Benedictine Palace \/ F\u00e9camp, Seita Museum \/ Paris, Saint Vincent de Paul Hospital \/ Paris, General Motors Collection \/ Detroit.<\/p>\n

Luxembourg Museum, Paris \/ Villa Saint Cyr Art Center, Bourg-La-Reine \/ H\u00f4tel Bertrand Museum, Ch\u00e2teauroux \/ National Library of France, Paris \/ Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai… Kriki has been exhibited by the Galeries Loft, Paris \/ Enrico Navarra, Paris \/ Reflex Modern Art, Amsterdam \/ Il Capricorno, Venice \/ Riff Art, Paris and Istanbul, Nordine Zidoun, Luxembourg \/ Galerie du Center, Paris \/ Yvon Lambert Project, Paris \/ Guy Pieters Gallery, Knokke- Le-Zoute \/ Jerome de Noirmont, Paris \/ Kamel Mennour, Paris…<\/p>\n

Kriki has participated in many Contemporary Art Fairs with One-man-shows for FIAC, Paris \/ Art Paris, Grand Palais, Paris \/ Pan Art Fair, Amsterdam \/ Contemporary Art Fair, Strasbourg \/ Art Feria, Bologna \/ Art Fair, Cologne \/ Gramercy Art Fair, New York \/ Young Art YA Art Fair, Miami.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Born in 1965 in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, Kriki founded in 1984 the plastic artist group Nukl\u00e9-Art and the electro-punk music group Les Envahisseurs and produced numerous stencils and hacks of advertising displays in the streets and the metro of the Paris region, thus participating in the emergence of Street Art. In 1985 he participated in the wild frescoes of the Ourcq canal then joined forces with \u00c9ditions Parall\u00e8les for the publication of \u201cPochoirs \u00e0 la Une\u201d, an essential reference for the pioneers of stencil and Street Art. For the critic Jean-Luc Chalumeau he is \u201ca fundamental figure of punk culture in contemporary French art\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11713,"template":"","artist_cat":[24],"class_list":["post-11710","artist","type-artist","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","artist_cat-painter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist\/11710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/artist"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galerieloft.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist_cat?post=11710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}