Secondary Market
Speedy Graphito
French, born 1961
Speedy Graphito (Olivier Rizzo, born Paris 1961) is one of the pioneers of French street art. Since the early 1980s he has remixed cartoon heroes, video-game characters, brand logos and masterpieces of art history into colourful paintings about the images that shape our culture.
Biography
Speedy Graphito is the name under which Olivier Rizzo, born in Paris in 1961 and trained at the École Estienne, has worked since the early 1980s. He belongs to the first generation of French urban artists: a member of the collective X-Moulinex in 1983, present at the founding gathering of the graffiti movement in Bondy in 1985, and known to a wide public through the poster he designed for the Ministry of Culture campaign La Ruée vers l’art.
A language of borrowed images
His paintings are made from pictures everyone already knows. Mickey, Mario and Astro Boy, consumer logos and the masters of modern art — Van Gogh, Matisse, Warhol, Wesselmann — are cut up, recombined and played against each other, notably in the series Mon histoire de l’art. A hybrid figure with a rabbit’s head on a human body has served as his emblem since the 1980s. Titles often work as puns: Exit Through the Bullshit winks at the title of Banksy’s 2010 film.
Official commissions and museum shows
In 1993 he designed the emblem of Altaïr, the French-Russian crewed space mission run with the French space agency CNES, as well as the visual identity of the Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris. His first museum retrospective, Un Art de Vivre, opened at the Musée du Touquet-Paris-Plage in 2016. It was followed by Le Musée Imaginaire de Speedy Graphito at the Hôtel Départemental des Arts du Var in Toulon (2019), Mondes imaginaires at the Musée en Herbe in Paris (2021–2022) and La grande illusion at Fluctuart, Paris (2024).
A Miami chapter
Speedy Graphito spent several years based in the United States, with a studio in Miami. He presented Speedy Goes to Miami in 2011, and in 2017 showed An American Story, new paintings made in the city, at Fabien Castanier Gallery in Wynwood. His work has also been included in the UrbanArt Biennale at Völklingen (2019) and in Les Pionniers du Street Art at the Institut culturel Bernard Magrez in Bordeaux (2022).