GRAFFITI PARIS

As much as London, New York and Los Angeles, Paris has been hijacked by street artists who have transformed public spaces into giant showrooms with their posters, stickers, silk-screens, paintings, mosaics, murals, stencils and photocopies. Photographer and art historian Fabienne Grevy leads a tour of Paris'' popular art, exhibited on pavements, stairways, metro stations, abandoned buildings and anywhere else an artist found a patch of open space. The inspirations for these images is as diverse as the artists producing them, and recognizable sources range from the cave paintings at Lascaux to nineteenth-century Japanese blockprints to graphic design to cartoons and comics and even some rather reflexive street art about street art itself.