Banksy is a UK street artist, political activist, and film director whose real name and identity remain the subject of much speculation. Active since the 90s, his work grew out of the hugely influential Bristol underground scene.
Alongside the influence of punk and the early New York underground scene, Banksy says that he was somewhat inspired by 3D, a graffiti artist and founding member of the musical group Massive Attack.
Banksy once characterised graffiti as a form of underclass guerrilla warfare that allows an individual to snatch away power, territory and glory from a bigger and better equipped enemy. He sees a social class component to this struggle, remarking “If you don’t own a train company then you go and paint on one instead.”
His works have dealt with various political and social themes, including anti-war, anti-consumerism, anti-imperialism, anti-authoritarianism, anarchism and existentialism. Additionally, the components of the human condition that his works commonly critique are greed, poverty, hypocrisy, boredom, despair, absurdity, and alienation.
In summarising his list of “people who should be shot”, BANKSY listed “Fascist thugs, religious fundamentalists, (and) people who write lists telling you who should be shot.”
When speaking about his 2005 work Show me the Monet, Banksy explained:
The vandalised paintings reflect life as it is now. We don’t live in a world like Constable’s Haywain anymore and, if you do, there is probably a travellers’ camp on the other side of the hill. The real damage done to our environment is not done by graffiti writers and drunken teenagers, but by big business… exactly the people who put gold-framed pictures of landscapes on their walls and try to tell the rest of us how to behave.
Show me the Monet repurposes Claude Monet’s Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, with the inclusion of two shopping carts and an orange traffic cone. This painting was later sold for £7.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2020.
Banksy no longer sells photographs or reproductions of his street graffiti, but his public ‘installations’ are regularly resold, sometimes by removing the wall on which they were painted. A small number of his works are officially, non-publicly, sold through his agency; Pest Control.
