ZEVS

ZEVS is the name of Christophe Aguirre Schwarz, born in 1977 and raised in Paris by two painter parents. He took his pseudonym at fourteen, after narrowly escaping an RER train whose mission code read ZEUS. A graffiti writer in the 1990s, he lives and works between Paris and Berlin.

Attacks on the image

Around 2000 ZEVS began to work directly on the visual environment of the city. His Electric Shadows traced in paint the shadows of street furniture; his Visual Attacks marked the models of advertising posters as if they had been shot — including, in 2001, the Centre Pompidou’s own Hitchcock exhibition poster. In 2002 he cut the model out of a giant Lavazza billboard on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz and issued a ransom demand; the Visual Kidnapping was formally closed at the Palais de Tokyo in 2005. With Proper Graffiti he wrote by cleaning dirty walls with a pressure washer.

Liquidated Logos

From around 2006 ZEVS repainted brand logos in their own colours and let the paint run, as if the emblem were melting. After the 2008 financial crisis the series reached the banks, from Lehman Brothers to Goldman Sachs. On 13 July 2009, the night before his first exhibition in Asia, he liquidated a Chanel logo on the façade of Chater House in Hong Kong; he was arrested, pleaded guilty and received a suspended sentence, and the episode made the series known worldwide.

Exhibitions

The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen devoted his first major survey, Electroshock, to him in 2008. He showed Euro Liquidated at the Palais de Tokyo and took part in La Force de l’Art 02 at the Grand Palais in 2009, and in the Biennale de Lyon in 2019. Noir Éclair occupied the Château de Vincennes in 2016–2017, and for Nuit Blanche 2018 he lit the Eiffel Tower with Eiffel Phoenix. In Miami he opened Art Miami 2012 with the performance YES liquidated.