Jisbar — Jean-Baptiste Launay, b. 1989 — is a French artist based in Lisbon whose practice operates at the intersection of art history and popular culture, producing offbeat, parodic reinterpretations that find in the collision of canonical imagery and contemporary visual language something genuinely new. His works layer symbols, text, and both realistic and instinctive mark-making into compositions of considerable density — surfaces that reward sustained examination, each element in dialogue with the others, multiple readings available depending on where you look and what you bring to the looking.
His engagement with art history is direct and irreverent. His reinterpretations of the Mona Lisa have become a defining strand of his practice — culminating in a performance on the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death in which he sent his reinterpretation of the painting into space, floating 33.4 kilometres above Earth for over an hour and a half. He became the first artist ever to achieve such a feat. The international media coverage that followed confirmed what the art world had already understood: that Jisbar operates at the level of genuine cultural event rather than mere gallery practice.
His institutional credentials are considerable. His work has been exhibited at the Louvre Museum in collaboration with the Grand Palais Immersif, and at the National Museum for the History of Immigration in Paris, where he presented Love is the New Fame to then-President François Hollande at an exhibition condemning racism and antisemitism. He has collaborated with Patek Philippe, BMW, Armani, Ducati, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and with figures including MotoGP champion Fabio Quartararo and DJ Snake.
His Krylon Monkey original, available through Creed Gallery, represents his Pop-Street visual language at its most fully developed. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
