Urban Mix Fontaine au Roi — artwork #606 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. …

A cycling enthusiast since childhood, the artist taught himself to tinker with, repair and restore bicycles from a young age. As a daily cyclist in Paris, he experienced first-hand the dangers faced by riders in city traffic. In 2013, after being given some thirty unused bikes, he created his first installation in the 1st arrondissement: a half-bike — front wheel and handlebars — bolted to a build…