ARTISTS
Itvan Kebadian was born in Paris in 1985 to an Armenian father, a film director, and a mother who is also a film director. He is the second of a blended family of four children.
Like his stateless grandfather, he never liked to settle down, and like him, he multiplied his moves by cultivating the idea of nomadism.
He began to "graffiti" at the age of 13. Naturally rebellious, he educates himself between several schools of Fine Arts and mixes movie influences and urban scenes with references learned during his artistic career, all on drawing sheets or directly on the walls.
From his childhood and the time spent on the rooftops of Paris from which he observed the people and the street, he keeps an attraction for urban life and remembers "liking to see the city as a video game, a parallel world". Even today he perceives and treats the city as a jungle, and the crowd as a pack.
He fundamentally loves graffiti, and keeps this vision of a world without social classes, where the protagonists remain anonymous by changing their names like in the Foreign Legion, and clash over territories, for their conquest, or for power struggles.
"People know the street art but much less the codes of the graffiti, when I speak about it I realize that it is more underground than what I thought".
His universe remains marked as well by the engravings of Dürer, Japanese prints as medieval art, while Kurosawa and Ridley Scott are never far away. The phenomenon of the "Yellow Vests" feeds him with a ready-made topical subject.
