Banksy

Banksy

Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist, businessman, and film director who has never publicly confirmed his identity. Active since the 1990s, he came out of the Bristol underground scene, a mix of artists and musicians working close to the street and outside the usual art world. His art is satirical, sharp, and often funny in a dark way, joining graffiti, stencilled images, and short subversive epigrams.

He began as a freehand graffiti artist from 1990 to 1994 as part of Bristol’s DryBreadZ Crew, alongside two other artists known as Kato and Tes. Local artists helped shape his work, including Nick Walker, Inkie, and 3D, and during this period he met Bristol photographer Steve Lazarides, who began selling his work and later became his agent. By 2000, Banksy had moved toward stencilling after realising how much faster it was. He has said the idea came while he was hiding from the police under a rubbish lorry and noticed a stencilled serial number.

That stencilling technique became one of his signatures, helping his images spread through Bristol, London, and then far beyond. His first known large wall mural, The Mild Mild West, was painted in 1997 on Stokes Croft in Bristol to cover advertising on a former solicitors’ office. It shows a teddy bear throwing a Molotov cocktail at three riot police. His recurring subjects have included rats, apes, policemen, soldiers, children, and the elderly, often carrying anti-war, anti-capitalist, or anti-establishment messages.

Public art and public argument

Banksy is best known for work placed in public view: on streets, walls, bridges, and self-built physical props. Much of it can be classed as temporary art. He no longer sells photographs or reproductions of his street graffiti, while some public installations are resold, sometimes by removing the wall on which they were painted. A small number of works are officially sold through Pest Control, an agency he created.

His exhibitions and projects widened the scale of his public presence. In 2002, his first Los Angeles exhibition, Existencilism, opened at 331⁄3 Gallery in Silver Lake. In 2003, Turf War in a London warehouse included painted animals and drew protest from an animal rights activist, though the RSPCA declared the conditions suitable. In 2004, he made spoof British £10 notes replacing the Queen with Princess Diana and changing “Bank of England” to “Banksy of England.” In 2005, during a trip to the Palestinian territories, he created nine images on the Israeli West Bank wall. In 2006, Barely Legal in Los Angeles was billed as a “three-day vandalised warehouse extravaganza.”

Banksy also moved into film, directing and starring in the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which debuted at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated in January 2011 for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. His words still resonate because they are built like his images: brief, direct, and made for public space. A line such as “If you get tired, learn to rest, not quit” fits the same plainspoken energy, turning a small sentence into something people can carry with them.