Gzup Louise Michel — artwork #4812 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 …

Born in Caen in 1987, the artist discovered street art in the early 2000s through a magazine photograph of an Obey piece. He took up graffiti and quickly covered the walls of his hometown before turning to stencil work, seeking a more figurative and striking form of expression. Training in metalwork and then boilermaking gave him hands-on skills that would later shape his practice. He moved to Par…

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. …