Zevs (artist)

Zevs (born Christophe Aghirre Schwarz on 17 November 1977 in Saverne, France) is a French street artist, best known for his trademark "liquidation" technique.

He was an early and influential graffiti artist and active as a tagger in Paris in the 1990s. He is named after a regional train, Zeus, that almost ran him over one day he was down in the metro. Working with other French artists in the second half of the 1990s like André and Invader, Zevs has been among the prominent figures who pioneered the French street art scene.

By the end of the 1990s he became known for his poetic drawings of shadows in Paris, shortly after the departure of Facundo Newbery from Paris. Later he 'bombed' models on the billboards between the eyes. Though his interventions have been very popular, it has been discussed in France whether it is vandalism or art.

In 2008 Zevs had his first major survey exhibition at the classical art museum the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Denmark. His work, including selections of all of his major series to that point, was displayed alongside masterpieces in the museum's permanent collections such as Édouard Manet's The Absinthe Drinker and Auguste Rodin's The Thinker.

In the early 2000s, Zevs embarked on a campaign of creating "Electric Shadows" on the streets of Paris. In this series, he created outlines of the shadows around common objects on the streets, such as streetlights, benches and entrances to the Paris Metro using spray paint. The original shadows would disappear under daylight, but the Electric Shadows remained as lasting reminders of the city's appearance at night.

In 2002 he cut out a model of a gigantic Lavazza-poster at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Above the hole in the poster he wrote: "VISUAL KIDNAPPING – PAY NOW!" This intervention not only struck a chord with art lovers and people in Berlin, it has also inspired political activists. Stealing an image from a poster in Germany is now spoken of in the media as a visual kidnapping.

"Visual kidnapping is like entering an interactive game: If the brand on the billboard kidnaps the attention of the public with the purpose of consumer demand, I reverse the situation and I kidnap the model on the poster and I demand a ransom of 500,000€ from the brand. This sum represents the symbolic price of an advertising campaign for the brand."

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