Invader

Invader is the pseudonym of a French artist, born in 1969 in France, who has worked anonymously and in a mask throughout his public career. Multiple sources report that the person behind the pseudonym is Franck Slama, but this identification has not been confirmed by the artist himself and should be treated as widely reported rather than officially verified. He is documented as having completed a master's degree at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris sometime in the 1990s.

Beginning around 1997 to 1998, Invader started installing small mosaics based on the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders on the streets of Paris, a project he calls his "invasion." The practice expanded globally; by the mid-2020s he had placed more than 4,000 mosaics across roughly 70 to 87 cities and territories, figures that vary somewhat by source and update date. Around 2005 he began a parallel studio practice built from Rubik's Cubes, which he terms "Rubikcubism." In 2012 he sent a work into the stratosphere as part of a project called Art4Space, and in 2019 astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti carried one of his works aboard the International Space Station. As of mid-2026 he remains active, with a large-scale Paris exhibition in 2024 and continued output documented into 2026 on his studio's social channels.

Because Invader works anonymously and mostly outside traditional gallery review cycles, sustained independent art criticism of his work is thinner than for artists with comparable auction results, and no exact, attributable quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile. The most visible framing of his stature comes from the galleries that handle his work, which describe him as one of the leading figures in urban art alongside artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey; that language is promotional rather than independent criticism and should be read as such. A 2023 profile in The New Yorker treated him at length as an active, significant artist, discussing his Paris mosaics and his interventions near the Louvre, which is the clearest evidence of mainstream press attention to his practice.

Invader's auction record is Astroboy TK_119, a 2014 mosaic that sold for USD 1,220,000 at Sotheby's New York on 15 November 2019, a result reported consistently across multiple auction-market sources. Below that peak, his market is broad rather than deep: dealers describe his work as regularly selling for six figures on the secondary market, and one industry tracker cites more than 200 auction lots sold by 2020 and over 2,400 auction offers across roughly nineteen years, though that later figure comes from a single source and has not been independently corroborated. There is no single auction-market artist confusable with this name; "Invader" functions as a standalone pseudonym in every gallery, auction house, and reference source reviewed, with "Franck Slama" appearing only as an attributed, unconfirmed alias.

Invader has no confirmed exclusive representing gallery or estate; galleries that have exhibited or sold his work include Jonathan Roze Gallery in Paris, Over the Influence, Maddox Gallery, and the Paris gallery formerly known as Le Feuvre, later Le Feuvre and Roze, though exhibition history should not be read as proof of current formal representation. No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed for any body of his work, including his prints, which puts extra weight on gallery and dealer authentication given his anonymity. Public museum holdings of his work are not clearly documented in available sources, so collectors should treat institutional exhibition history, such as his 2023 museum show in Ljubljana, as evidence of critical attention rather than proof of permanent collection placement. His auction record rests on a single standout sale, so that figure should not be read as representative of typical results in his market.