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### Pixels made of tile

Invader took his name from Space Invaders, the arcade game whose blocky aliens are drawn on a grid of pixels. By his own account the project began when he decided to give pixelation a material form: a square ceramic tile stands in for each pixel, and a character is assembled tile by tile and fixed to a wall. The first catalogued piece, a blue alien, went up in Paris in 1998.

The idea travelled quickly. London, Tokyo and Los Angeles were invaded in 1999, New York and Geneva in 2000, Hong Kong in 2001, and later Berlin, Bangkok and Melbourne among many others. Over time the cast widened from the original aliens to other characters from early games and popular culture, but the method stayed the same: small, hard, brightly coloured tiles, fixed at what he calls the "neuralgic points" of a city, a choice he likens to urban acupuncture.

### The city as a game board

He calls each campaign an invasion and runs the project as a game whose goal, in his words, is to keep increasing his score. A city typically receives 20 to 50 pieces, sometimes in several waves, and each piece is worth between 10 and 100 points, so every city carries a running score. Many campaigns are recorded in an invasion map or guide; the 29th map, covering the Basque cities of Bayonne, Anglet and Biarritz, came out in 2025. In 2014 the game moved onto phones with Flash Invaders, an app that lets anyone take part. The count passed 4,000 in 2021, when the 4,000th mosaic was fixed to a wall in Potosí, Bolivia, at an altitude of about 4,000 metres, and by 2026 his studio was counting more than 180 invaded cities.

### Theft and the Alias

In August 2017 two men posing as city workers took around 15 mosaics from Paris streets, among them a large Mona Lisa near the Louvre, and the artist said thieves target his work every summer. His answer was practical: stronger glue and more fragile tiles that break if anyone tries to lift them. He has also given each street piece, past or present, a single exact replica, which he calls its Alias. On his own site he describes removals for resale as the main threat to the work, far more common than removals by building owners or cleaning crews.

### Rubikcubism

In 2005 Invader began building pictures from Rubik's Cubes, a strand of work he named Rubikcubism. It extends the same thinking about pixels, but the cube's six colours act as a fixed palette, so the images sit close to abstraction and resolve only from a distance or through a phone camera. The first piece, made that year, was an untitled square only 16.5 cm across; later panels run to hundreds of cubes. His subjects are borrowed images. He pays what he calls "insolent tributes" to famous paintings, starting with a study of the Mona Lisa, and has also made portraits of real and fictional antiheroes. In 2009 he turned to album covers for a show of his ten favourite records at Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York; one of them, Rubik Breakfast in America, is a tribute to the first LP he ever bought.

### Editions and collaborations

Alongside the unique works runs a large body of editioned work: screenprints, tile kits for collectors, city maps and guides, books and multiples. In 2023 HENI Editions published large-format Rubikcubism prints. In 2025 he joined Damien Hirst and Shepard Fairey (Obey) for Triple Trouble at Newport Street Gallery in London, which ran from October 2025 to March 2026 and brought the three together in new collaborative works, with print editions published by HENI.

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Rubik Space, 2005 | Artcurial, Paris

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Rubik Mona Lisa, 2005 | Artcurial, Paris

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Alias SP-52, 2011 | Phillips, London

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Invader is a French street artist, born in 1969, who has spent more than a quarter of a century fixing small ceramic-tile mosaics to the walls of cities around the world. The first went up in Paris in 1998. Built square by square like the pixels of an early video game, many picture the aliens of the arcade game Space Invaders or other 8-bit characters, and each one is numbered, mapped and given a score. He keeps his identity private. In 2015 one of his mosaics was installed aboard the International Space Station.

Invader's market divides sharply between unique works and editions. At the top of the market, Rubik's Cube assemblages and Aliases reach six figures, while screenprints, Invasion Kits and multiples change hands from a few hundred pounds to several thousand.

Among the highest recorded auction results is Rubik Space (2005), an assemblage of Rubik's Cubes on plywood, which sold for €492,600 including premium at Artcurial in Paris on 16 December 2020. Rubik Mona Lisa (2005) reached €480,200 at Artcurial on 23 February 2020, against an estimate of €120,000 to €150,000. Alias SP-52 (2011), ceramic tiles on Perspex with its ID card, sold for £107,950 including premium at Phillips in London on 11 October 2024.

Editions show a much flatter range. At Phillips in London, a sealed and signed Invasion Kit #16 (Flashinvaders) (2014, edition of 250) made £7,620 including premium in September 2024, and a sealed Invasion Kit #01 (2000, edition of 350) made £6,350 including premium in January 2025. The screenprint Homeworks (Signed) (2006, edition of 100) sold for £6,350 including premium in September 2024, well above its estimate, while Rubik Shot Red Marilyn NVDR1-4 (2023), a HENI giclée in an edition of 774, made £4,445 including premium in January 2025. At the entry level, the vinyl multiple 3D Little Big Space (edition of 5,000) sold for £787 including premium at Roseberys in London in February 2025.

Set any price against sales of the same version: a sealed kit, a signed print or an Alias with its ID card is not interchangeable with an opened, unsigned or undocumented example.

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