Banksy

Anonymous graffiti artist and political activist of unverified identity

• Born: 1974

Significance: Anonymous artist Banksy has brought graffiti art, which was once associated strongly with vandalism, into the mainstream art world. His works have sold for thousands of dollars and broken auction house records.

Background

Banksy is an anonymous graffiti artist, political activist, and filmmaker of unverified identity. It is believed that he was born in Bristol, England, in 1974. Although many theories swirl, few details about his personal life have ever been confirmed. Banksy first came onto the street art scene in the early 1990s. In the beginning, he would tag his work as Robin Banx, but he ultimately shortened this name to Banksy. It was also around this time he began using his distinctive stencil approach to graffiti, primarily to cut down the time it took him to paint a piece. However, he told an author friend he could feel the power in stencils and liked their "political edge."

By the late 1990s, Banksy headed to London. During this time, he began to retreat even further into anonymity. One reason for Banksy's desire to remain anonymous was to avoid police when doing his graffiti art, which is also why he used stencils to reduce his painting time. Another reason he hid his identity was that he realized that anonymity created its own buzz. As more of his works began to pop up all over Britain, Banksy was soon compared to other famous artists, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

In the early 2000s, Banksy began to hold exhibitions of his work. His first in London was in a tunnel near a pub on Rivington Street that he and fellow artists organized. He wrote that the artwork was put up in twenty-five minutes, and the group held an opening party that almost five hundred people attended. Banksy's breakthrough exhibit came in July of 2003. "Turf War," as he called it, was staged in a former warehouse and had a carnival-atmosphere display. It included a live cow, its hide embellished with a portrait of Andy Warhol, and a chimpanzee dressed as Queen Elizabeth II.

Life's Work

After many years being involved in the graffiti scene, Banksy has developed an entire art subculture devoted to his works. Banksy often uses multi-layered stencils and spray paint to convey his messages. He is also known to include anything found in the streets—such as signs, lampposts, and other objects—to create street art installations. His work is often satirical and combines dark humor with graffiti to spread messages about art, philosophy, and politics.

In August of 2005, Banksy traveled to Palestine and the West Bank, where he stenciled several images to express his views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Some of the images included The Flower Thrower, which depicts a masked Palestinian man, who appears to be involved in a fight or riot, throwing a bouquet of flowers. He also painted Girl Frisking Soldier, which shows a young girl patting down a soldier. The images were a hit and went viral online. It was around this time that Banksy's prints and paintings were racking up record-breaking sales at auction houses. The successful sales and the viral nature of his work officially allowed him to break into the commercial art business.

In addition to being an artist and activist, Banksy is also a filmmaker. His first major foray into film was the 2010 British documentary Exit through the Gift Shop. The film tells the story of how a French shopkeeper and documentary filmmaker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back around on him. Banksy also codirected The Antics Roadshow, a 2011 film that looks at famous pranks and acts of activism.

Banksy's artwork has shown up and been seen all around the world, including in Australia, the United States, Israel, Jamaica, Canada, and his native England. It is widely speculated that Banksy's real name is Robin Gunningham, but no claim has ever been verified by either the artist himself or Pest Control, the organization he set up to authenticate his work and protect him from prying outsiders. Hiding behind a paper bag—as he did when he was named to Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people in 2010—or email, Banksy controls his own narrative and has not conducted a face-to-face interview since 2003.

In September 2015, Banksy debuted an elaborate amusement park and conceptual art show called Dismaland in England. A collaboration with more than fifty other artists, Dismaland distorted aspects of the theme park Disneyland to provide political and social commentary on everything from the environment to refugees. His next large project, Walled Off Hotel, appeared in 2017 in Bethlehem. The hotel—which features rooms of artwork by Banksy as well as a gallery exhibiting work by Palestinian artists—was constructed directly next to the barrier wall that separates Israel from the Palestinian territories. Originally intended to be open for just 2017, which marked one hundred years since the British took control of Palestine, the hotel continued to take guests into 2019.

In 2018, a canvas version of one of Banksy’s most popular works Girl with Balloon (2006) was sold at auction for $1.4 million. Directly after being sold, the piece self-destructed by partially shredding through a shredder hidden in the frame. Banksy claimed credit for the destruction of the canvas and Pest Control later announced that it had become a new piece of art, now titled Love is in the Bin.

He returned to public graffiti later that year, producing Season's Greetings—a two-sided piece that showed a child tasting falling snow on one side and fire causing smoke and embers on the other—on the walls of a steelworker's garage in Wales. In 2019, Banksy's 2009 painting Devolved Parliament, which depicts members of parliament as chimpanzees, sold for £9.9 million, the most any Banksy artwork had sold for.

In October 2019, Banksy opened a pop-up shop called Gross Domestic Product in South London to help combat a trademark dispute with the greeting card company Full Colour Black. The company had challenged Banksy's trademark for his art on the grounds that he was not using it in order to claim the name to sell merchandise.

His next work, the mural Valentine's Banksy, appeared in on February 13, 2020, in the Baron Hill neighborhood of Bristol. The mural depicted a girl shooting a slingshot; the ammunition was created using real red flowers and leaves. It was defaced only a few days after Banksy had claimed the work as his. Later that year, he painted Painting for Saints, which depicts a child choosing to play with a toy nurse over various superheroes and was dedicated to healthcare workers during the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In March 2021, he created a mural on the side of Reading Prison in Reading, England, depicting a prisoner escaping the prison using bedsheets tied together and anchored to a typewriter. Several critics noted the image resembled writer Oscar Wilde, who had been imprisoned there in the mid-1890s. Later that year Banksy created A Great British Spraycation, a collection of murals that appeared in a number of towns on the east coast of England.

In November 2022 Banksy, through his social media accounts, confirmed that he had visited Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian invasion that began in February of that year to create a series of seven murals located in areas of the country that had been affected by the war. At the time of their appearance in Ukraine, many interpreted the murals (one of which depicts a young boy beating a much larger man in a martial arts contest) as a show of support for the nation.

In March 2024, on St. Patrick's Day, a confirmed Banksy mural was found in London's Finsbury Park. Painted on a wall behind a bare tree, the mural gives the impression that it in full leaf.

Impact

Banksy's impact on the art world, and especially on street art, is immense. He rose through the ranks to become one of the world's most famous street artists, partly by creating a mystery around his identity. Fans of his work are consistently satisfied with every piece Banksy delivers, but he always leaves them wanting more. Banksy's artistic creations have inspired other street artists. This inspiration has become known as the Banksy effect. As Banksy's work grew in popularity and skyrocketed in price at auction houses, the work of other graffiti artists became more popular as well.

Personal Life

Due to Banksy's desire to remain anonymous, little is known about the artist's personal life. He is believed to have been born in 1974 in Bristol, England.

Selected Works: Documentaries

• Exit through the Gift Shop, 2010
• The Antics Roadshow, 2011

Selected Works: Artwork

• The Flower Thrower, 2005
• Girl Frisking Soldier, 2005
• Girl with Balloon, 2006
• Devolved Parliament, 2009
• Slave Labour, 2012
• The Son of a Migrant from Syria, 2015
• Love is in the Bin, 2018
• Painting for Saints, 2020
• A Great British Spraycation, 2021

Bibliography

Collins, Lauren. "Banksy Was Here: The Invisible Man of Graffiti Art." The New Yorker, 14 May 2007, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/14/banksy-was-here. Accessed 14 Feb. 2017.

Desmarais, Charles. "Saving Banksy: Street Art's Uncertain Road to Stature."San Francisco Chronicle, 19 Jan. 2017, www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Saving-Banksy-a-lively-documentary-about-10866182.php. Accessed 30 Jul. 2024.

Ellsworth-Jones, Will. Banksy: The Man behind the Wall. St. Martin's Press, 2013.

Ellsworth-Jones, Will. "The Story behind Banksy." Smithsonian Magazine, Feb. 2013, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-story-behind-banksy-4310304/?page=1. Accessed 30 Jul. 2024.

Hines, Nico. "The Secret Life of the Real Banksy, Robin Gunningham." The Daily Beast, 16 Jan. 2019, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/11/the-secret-life-of-the-real-banksy-robin-gunningham.html. Accessed 30 Jul. 2024.

Martin, Guy. "Clues and Legal Liabilities: What Happened After Banksy Shredded His Own $1.4 Million Artwork." Forbes, 2 Jan 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/guymartin/2018/12/31/clues-and-legal-liabilities-what-happened-after-banksy-shredded-his-own-1-4-million-artwork/#32a8333e61c7. Accessed 30 Jul. 2024.

Tanno, Sophie, and Jacqui Palumbo. "Banksy Confirms Seven New Murals in Ukraine." CNN, 14 Nov. 2022, www.cnn.com/style/article/banksy-ukraine-murals/index.html. Accessed 30 Jul. 2024.

"Who Is Banksy? Everything We Know about the Anonymous Artist." BBC, 18 Mar. 2024, www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-50249349. Accessed 30 Jul. 2024.