Ankhone: from the Grenoble walls to Montréal public art
Published July 30, 2026
Ankhone learned graffiti at the foot of the Alps, studied graphic design in Troyes, joined one of the best-known Parisian collectives, then chose Montréal. Thirty years later, the City's public art portal lists seven works under his name, almost all of them co-signed.
That detail is the key to his practice: Ankhone is a muralist who works with others, and his career reads as a series of encounters rather than a series of solo pieces.
Grenoble, then a diploma
Ankhone began painting graffiti in the early 1990s on the walls of Grenoble, the city where he grew up, at the foot of the Alps. What happened next is less common in this discipline: rather than staying strictly self-taught, he enrolled at the École supérieure d'art appliqué in Troyes, where he graduated in graphic design. The two schools of thought, the wall and the studio, ended up feeding each other.
That double training explains a formal quality rarely found in a pure writer's work: a sense of composition, of typographic hierarchy, of colour that holds together at every scale. Art Public Montréal notes that he gradually carried his pictorial and graphic work over into painting while preserving his graffiti influences, and that he defines his style as poetry in motion.
9e Concept and the Paris years
In 2001 Ankhone joined 9e Concept, one of the best-known Parisian collectives of the period, a group that moved fluidly between street practice, illustration, exhibition and commissioned work. He also served as art director of Graff It, a magazine that documented the French graffiti scene at a moment when almost nobody else was.
Those years matter because they turned a writer into a professional. Working inside a collective means learning to hand over part of a piece, to hold a deadline, to answer a brief without losing a voice. It is exactly the skill set that a public art commission demands, and it is the reason his Montréal career took the shape it did.
Montréal, seven works, seven collaborations
Ankhone first came to Canada in 2010 and settled in Montréal a year later. Art Public Montréal catalogues seven works under his name, and the list reads like a map of the local scene: Fragments of Change and Les portes du temps with Nicole Boyce, Les rapides with Dodo Ose, Cocréer notre futur with Amelia Hadouchi, Diversité with Benny Wilding, an untitled piece with Fuse One, and Il fait toujours beau au-dessus des nuages.
Six of the seven are co-signed, which is unusual enough to be a signature in itself. Painting with someone else means accepting that the finished wall will not look exactly like your own sketch, and it is the most demanding form of the discipline. He also works with ASHOP Productions, the Montréal collective behind many of the city's large-scale walls, and has painted for the Lachine Canal national historic site.
The question of scale
Ankhone has been painting murals for more than twenty years, at every size the discipline allows: grain silos, entire parking entrances, interior walls, and canvases. Very few artists can move across that range, because each format demands a different technique. A silo is painted from a lift, in wind, with colour that must read from three hundred metres. An interior wall is painted at arm's length, where every hesitation shows.
For a client, that range is the practical value of the artist. The same hand can sign a corporate lobby and a building facade, which keeps a visual identity coherent across a site instead of scattering it between several styles.
Collecting Ankhone, or commissioning a wall
Because most of his production goes onto walls, canvases by Ankhone circulate in small numbers. Each available piece is original, signed and delivered with a certificate of authenticity, and its price is shown on its page. A collector buying one is acquiring the studio side of a practice whose public side is catalogued by the City.
For a mural, whether a home wall, an office, a facade or an industrial structure, L'Original scopes the project first: surface, access, support, exposure and time on site, then a quote. Ankhone's experience with co-signed public commissions makes him a natural choice for projects that involve several stakeholders.
