Banksy

Banksy is a British artist who has worked anonymously since the late 1990s. He emerged from the Bristol graffiti scene, where a crowded and heavily policed environment pushed him away from freehand writing and towards the stencil — a form that could be cut in advance, applied in seconds and repeated exactly. The decision was practical before it was aesthetic, and it produced the visual language the work has used ever since: flat, high-contrast, legible at a distance and from a moving car.

The images are built on collision. A rioter throws a bouquet. A girl reaches for a balloon on a bombed wall. Policemen embrace; children salute a shopping bag; rats carry placards. The method is consistent — take a figure the viewer already knows how to read, and change one element so the meaning inverts. Recurring subjects are authority, surveillance, war, consumption and the policing of public space, handled with a comic timing that has made the work unusually portable across languages and audiences. The pictures are designed to be understood immediately, by people not looking for art.

Placement carries as much of the meaning as the image. Work appears without permission on walls, bridges, shopfronts and separation barriers, sited so that the surrounding architecture completes the sentence — which is also what makes it difficult to collect, since removing the work from the wall removes half of it. That tension between a practice made for the street and a market that trades it indoors has become part of the subject: in 2018 a canvas partially destroyed itself by an internal shredder moments after being sold at auction, and the ruined work was subsequently valued far above the price it had just made.

Rather than exhibit through galleries, Banksy has staged his own projects and let them function as exhibitions. Banksy vs Bristol Museum in 2009 inserted his work, largely unannounced, into a civic museum's permanent displays. Better Out Than In, in New York in October 2013, took the form of a new piece on the street each day for a month, documented online. Dismaland, a temporary construction on the English coast in 2015, assembled work by dozens of artists inside a derelict-seaside-resort parody; when it closed after thirty-six days its timber was dismantled and sent to the refugee camp at Calais to build shelters.

He has never been represented by a gallery and has no public exhibition record in the conventional sense. Authentication runs through Pest Control, the office he established for the purpose, which issues certificates for studio works and consistently declines to authenticate pieces removed from the street — a position that has shaped the market in his work as decisively as anything he has painted.

AT A GLANCE

British; works anonymously

Emerged from the Bristol graffiti scene, late 1990s

Stencil, spray paint, screenprint, sculpture and installation

Authentication issued solely by Pest Control