Aladdin Sane (blue)

This signed screen print from 2014 is a limited edition of 65 from Invader’s Aladdin Sane series. It shows one of Invader’s famous Space Invader characters, through which the artist has reached world-fame, masked in the guise of singer David Bowie, who is instantly recognisable in his Aladdin Sane album cover shot by Brian Duffy. The print represents the singer in a pixelated, 8-bit version of his most iconic portrait, typical of Invader’s appropriative gestures and inventive visual language whereby popular imagery is constantly taken up and reinvented by the artist through his signature technique which references the earliest days of digital imagery.

In this print, which also comes in other three colour variations (Pinky, Yellow and Orange), Invader engages once again with the world-known singer. Indeed, Invader’s first and to this day most famous project, ‘Space Invader’ quotes in its name not only the Japanese video game Space Invader, from which he drew his initial repertoire of images, but also Bowie’s Moonage Daydream. In the song, featured in his The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Bowie is heard singing ‘I am a space invader’.

It seems then that Invader’s tribute to Bowie might be more widespread than usually acknowledged. After all, the two artists share their fascination with outer space, evident in songs like Starman, and Invader’s Art4Space projects.