Sarah Cascone
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Anonymous street artist Invader is going where few other artists have gone before: to outer space. One of the Frenchman’s signature tiled mosaic pieces, appropriately featuring a character from the 1970s arcade game Space Invader, is currently a passenger on board the International Space Station.
The work, titled Space2, follows in the footsteps of the artist’s Space1, which took a ride to the stratosphere via weather balloon in 2012. Invader has also made headlines at auction recently with a $258,000 Sotheby’s sale of one of the 35 works he produced last year during a brief stay in Hong Kong (see HK$2 Million for Invader’s Replica of Hong Kong Phooey Work and French Street Artist Invader Scuffs Up Hong Kong).
Invader, who also has new pieces at Belgium’s Euro Space Center and Germany’s European Astronaut Centre, both part of the European Space Agency, is part of a select group of artists to display their art in outer space.
Last year, the UK Space Agency and Glasgow’s ClydeSpace launched UKube-1, a satellite featuring artwork from Los Angeles’s gallery and production company iam8bit (see Conceptual Artwork Invites Aliens to Recharge Their Phones). A similar project saw Trevor Paglen‘s conceptual photography project The Last Pictures launched into orbit in 2012. While a proposed artist’s house on the moon has yet to come to fruition (see Swedish Artist Wants to Put a Sculpture on the Moon), the lunar surface has been home to artwork. Paul van Hoeydonck‘s Fallen Astronaut, an aluminum sculpture of an astronaut, has been on the moon since 1971.
In January, the Creators Project reported that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had spotted the Damien Hirst spot painting believed to have been lost when the 2002 Beagle 2 mission to Mars failed, meaning there is officially art on Mars. Even further afield, of course, is Voyager 1’s Golden Record, the only piece of art ever to leave the solar system.
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