Urban Collage with Mona Lisa by A2 — artwork #3897 by A2 · Paris, France

A2 is an anonymous French urban artist active in Paris. His pseudonym stands for "A squared" — "Amour et Anarchie" (Love and Anarchy) — the twin forces he places at the heart of his practice. A tagger since his teens, he turned to street art around 2010 and in 2011 adopted the persona of Louise Michel, the iconic figure of the Paris Commune, whom he depicts sporting a punk mohawk. His first major …

The artist started doing graffiti in the early 1990s before stepping away around 1996. In 2010, after visiting an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, he returned to the streets with a deliberate street art focus. His alias, pronounced "Djizeupe", is borrowed from Snoop Dogg's track "GZ Up, Hoes Down". He sees himself more as a vandal than an artist, valuing the illegal dimension of the practice. …

Born in 1982, the artist began in 2001 by pasting an identity photograph taken at eighteen — while still a high-school student — onto the walls of Paris. This simple act of posting his own face became the foundation of a conceptual practice built around promotion as artistic action, summed up by his motto: "It's the promotion that makes the artist or the zero degree of art." His work takes the fo…