10 Facts About Invader's Hello My Game Is

Designed as a journey through video game history and Invader's long career, Hello My Game Is... was an homage to Invader's greatest source of inspiration. From room to room, the exhibition in Paris chartered Invader's global campaign to fill cities with his pixelated Space Invader inspired characters.

The name tag works in this collection are a tongue-in-cheek comment on the artist's anonymous identity. Invader's entire oeuvre and public persona is based on the Space Invaders video game, hence the pixelated character which replaces a name in these tags.

Inspired by video games of the 1970s and 80s, Invader's pixelated works imitate the vintage style of 8-bit video games like Space Invaders and Pac Man.

Many of Invader's prints were self-published by the artist himself, in collaboration with POW (Pictures On Walls). Together, they developed a printing relief technique that gave the appearance of squares being raised, much like the mosaic pixels that Invader creates his physical works with.

Invader takes his name from Taito's iconic Space Invaders game, and recreates the pixelated characters from the game in mosaic and print. Since this original characters, Invader has also subverted iconic video game characters from Super Mario, Pac Man and Kirby.

Invader's 2017 exhibition, under the same title as this collection, transformed the art gallery into an arcade. Through his interactive installations and focus on the familiar video game characters of our childhood, Invader encouraged his viewers to embrace the child within.

Throughout his artistic career, Invader has been committed to taking art out of the bourgeois institution, and returning it to the people. Since the beginning of his Space Invaders project in 1998, Invader has pasted his pixelated characters on city walls around the world. His 2017 exhibition is an extension of this pursuit, showing the universal appeal of his work.

Born in 1969, Invader was raised in France and began creating his street art on the streets of Paris. Since then, his Space Invaders project has gone global, with one Invader even being sent to space.

As Invader has been installing his works in Paris since before 1998, it is hardly surprising that the city is one of his highest scoring in his World Invasion game. Throughout the city, Invader has pasted some of the most iconic video game characters, turning the spotting of his artwork into a physical video game of sorts.

On Invader's website, the artist proclaims that his artwork is ultimately "about liberating Art from its usual alienators that museums or institutions can be". Hello My Game Is... was an extension of this goal, as Invader made his exhibition an accessible and interactive space that was far removed from the traditionally austere art exhibition.