Banksy is a pseudonymous street artist, political activist and filmmaker based in England who has never publicly confirmed his identity. Active since the 1990s, he combines satirical street art and subversive epigrams with dark humour and graffiti made using a distinctive stencil technique. His works, featuring political and social commentary, have appeared on streets, walls and bridges around the world. His work developed out of Bristol's underground scene, where artists and musicians collaborated.
He began as a freehand graffiti artist between 1990 and 1994, as a member of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew alongside Kato and Tes. He was influenced by local artists and was part of the city's wider underground scene with Nick Walker, Inkie and 3D. During that period, he met Bristol photographer Steve Lazarides, who began selling his work and later became his agent. Around 2000, Banksy turned to stencils after, as he tells it, hiding from the police beneath a rubbish truck and noticing its stencilled serial number. His first known large mural, The Mild Mild West, was painted in Bristol in 1997 and shows a teddy bear throwing a Molotov cocktail at three riot police officers.
His stencils combine striking and humorous images, often with slogans, and their message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-authoritarian. His subjects include rats, monkeys, police officers, soldiers, children and older people. Among his early exhibitions were Existencilism in Los Angeles in 2002 and Turf War in a London warehouse in 2003, where he painted on animals; although the RSPCA deemed the conditions suitable, an animal rights activist chained herself to railings in protest. He also reworked famous paintings, including Monet's The Water Lily Pond, to which he added rubbish and a supermarket trolley, and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.
In 2004, he printed counterfeit £10 notes, replacing the Queen's face with Princess Diana's and the inscription "Bank of England" with "Banksy of England". A large bundle was thrown into the crowd at the Notting Hill Carnival, and some people tried to spend the notes in shops, while reproducing such images is a criminal offence under British forgery law. That same year, he created the screen print Napalm, in which Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the girl photographed during the Vietnam War, appears screaming as Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse hold her hands. In 2005, during a trip to the Palestinian territories, he created nine images on the West Bank wall.
In 2006, the Barely Legal exhibition in Los Angeles included a live elephant painted in a pink and gold wallpaper pattern, intended to draw attention to global poverty; following complaints from activists, the elephant appeared unpainted on the final day. At the same exhibition, he depicted Queen Victoria as a lesbian and presented satirical works incorporating art by Andy Warhol and Leonardo da Vinci. Representatives of Keep Britain Tidy described his work as simple vandalism, saying that street art glorifies what is essentially vandalism.
Despite the objections, his works began setting auction records: in 2006, six screen prints of Kate Moss in Warhol's style sold at Sotheby's for £50,400, several times the estimate, and in December journalist Max Foster coined the term "Banksy effect" to describe the growing demand for other street artists. In 2007, Bombing Middle England fetched more than £102,000, while Banksy posted an image of an auction on his website with the words "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit". That same year, Transport for London removed his version of Pulp Fiction, showing Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta holding bananas instead of guns, arguing that graffiti creates an atmosphere of neglect and encourages crime; Banksy repainted the spot, with the actors holding real guns instead of bananas but wearing banana costumes.
In 2008, he organised The Cans Festival in a tunnel near London Waterloo station, inviting artists from around the world to paint freely. In 2009, the Banksy vs Bristol Museum exhibition at Bristol's museum attracted more than 300,000 visitors in twelve weeks. In 2013, the Better Out Than In series in New York City included a stall near Central Park where his original works sold for just $60 each, with almost no one noticing them, as well as a sculpture of Ronald McDonald with a homeless person shining his shoes. In 2015, he released a video from the Gaza Strip, where he painted a kitten on the ruins of a house destroyed by an air strike, and also opened Dismaland, a dark parody of a theme park in Weston-super-Mare. In 2017, he funded the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, with rooms overlooking the wall, and in 2018, a work of his originally titled Girl with Balloon sold for more than a million pounds; as the hammer fell, an alarm sounded inside the frame.
In 2010, Banksy directed and appeared in the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which premiered at the Sundance festival and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary.
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