Graffiti and street art in Paris

If you like graffiti and street art – Paris should be your the next destination. Paris is the home to some of the world’s greatest street artists and is a very popular destination for graffiti in Europe – and even in the world.

We went off, my sisters and I and this time to Paris. At the beginning, there seemed to be a lot of graffiti and street art in Paris but it was not clear what to expect. We spoiled ourselves in a meeting with four locals who would show us the way to the best areas and pieces of Graffiti, And the results was impressive.

Let’s start from the end to the beginning in a nutshell we visited four different places: Quarter 13, Belleville (Quarter 11 and Quarter 20), the Montmartre neighborhood, and the Paris suburb of Paris, a 20-minute drive that is now called the Graffiti Capital of France. The conclusions are: If there is a place to visit in Paris’s 13th arrondissement it is recommended to take a local guide or use this blog as a source of interesting stories and information about the works.

A little about the scene of graffiti and street art in Paris –

Graffiti in Paris probably existed from the 19th century with the French Revolution when the third class and the peasants went against the monarchy. However, the graffiti we know today, which began on the Metro in Paris, began in the 1970s, even before the phenomenon reached Tokyo and New York. Socially graffiti in Paris was a major means of propaganda when stencils were one of the most common and famous techniques in street art. One of the most famous and important artists is Blek la ret in Black La Rath, which sprayed many stencils of a human-sized rat in the early 1980s.

We were told that the graffiti started as a protest against the fact that advertising entered the public space and the artists said if we were permitted to do so, too.

Vitry-sur-Seine (Val de Marne)

Sometimes worth going out a little out of town to visit something really special. Vitry is definitely one of these places – a sleepy town but very popular for street art lovers and is located on the outskirts of Paris. The gray, impersonal city has become, in the last five years, a perfect workshop for street artists from around the world. Over 100 international artists and more than 400 graffiti works have made Vitry one of the best cities to discover an art street.

Thanks to the rumors people began to see street art and graffiti equipped with cameras. Today, the phenomenon is so prevalent that the municipality and the locals offer various guided tours in the area. In fact, it is absolutely not necessary to take a guided tour, although it is recommended, one way or another, if you walk around the Vitry-sur-Seine area you can enjoy plenty of graffiti in every corner. All you need to do is keep your eyes open. You will recognize huge murals from the sides of the buildings, or find vibrant portraits involved on mailboxes, walls and hidden alleys on the sides. Enjoy the attached map that shows you the location of some of the most impressive works.

It all started in 2008 when Christian Rubber, one of the best-known graffiti artists known as C215, lives in Vitry. After divorcing his wife, he began to draw portraits of his daughter so that she would know that her father was thinking about her and he sprayed them on the way from her home to school. In time he also drew portraits of his wife and scattered them on her way to work. After a while, the city walls were decorated with colorfulness, The sleepy town. Christian invited some of his fellow graffiti to join an urban project, so they turned Vitry into the playground for street artists and soon Vitry became a showcase for urban art. A hundred street artists from all over the world, anonymous and large names, turned the area into a trendy and cool in a few years.