It’s killing him that he has not been able to see the huge mural in person, although he hopes to revisit Houston one day soon to add his famous signature.Įven if he could have traveled, Blek says, the size was daunting. So he did not actually paint the wall himself. The big Houston wall was commissioned by Hines, the Zimmerman family and TIAA Global Asset Management and managed by Weingarten Art Group and it involved an international collaboration between the artist, a stencil maker in Los Angeles and a team of assistants.īlek, a gentle-looking family man whose real name is Xavier Prou, has been stuck at home about 50 miles from Paris since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Probably needless to say, this is a far cry from Blek’s youthful work on the streets of Paris, when his signature - a leaping rat - aptly illustrated his initial mode of working illegally.

Photo: Mark Mulligan, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Assistants of Blek Le Rat, an internationally renowned French artist known as the father of stencil graffiti, painted the 46-foot tall mural in a week, using about 140 stencils.

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