Urban Art Tour with Mr Byste

This afternoon we have a street art tour in the 20th Arrondissement. We met our guide at the allotted time and he introduced himself as Mr Byste. We don’t know his real name and he asked us not to post any photos of him as street art is illegal in Paris and can attract big fines (doesn’t stop him, but he doesn’t want to make it easy for the police, to date he has not been fined). It was great to have a tour with an authentic street artist who had so much insider knowledge of artists and their backgrounds stories. Mr Byste had studied law and engineering but made his way towards urban art. He is particularly interested in the skeleton of animals and much of his work is focused on rats and rabbits. He is scheduled to shadow an artist from the National Museum of Natural History shortly to help him develop his knowledge and technique.

He also assists many of his friends with their work and he recently completed a commission for the Sorbonne that took four of them six days (working pretty much around the clock) for which they were paid 80,000 euro. We saw council commissioned murals and private commissions, we also saw lots of unlawful art. At the conclusion of the tour Mr Byste invited us to stay and watch a collaboration he was doing with a friend, we saw the initial rabbit stencil, but I will need to check his Insta feed to see the completed work. We saw so much incredible urban art it was difficult to choose only twenty photos. My favourite pieces will be in this instalment but there may be a second instalment to follow.Read more