Banksy

In the mid-1990s, Banksy was a freehand graffiti writer operating with the DryBreadZ crew, often alongside two other artists known as Kato and Tes. His work was bold, colourful, and entirely illegal — pieces thrown up on trains, walls, and bridges around Bristol. By 1999, his first major street piece appeared on Stokes Croft: The Mild Mild West, a teddy bear hurling a Molotov cocktail at three riot police. Painted in broad daylight over three days, it was a direct response to police raids on the city's unlicensed warehouse parties and remains a local landmark to this day.

The shift that would define his career came after a close call with the law. Hiding beneath a garbage truck while police swept the area, he noticed the vehicle's stencilled serial number. In that moment, he understood that pre-cut stencils could deliver the same visual punch as freehand work in a fraction of the time, dramatically reducing the risk of arrest. By the late 1990s, he had all but abandoned the spray can for stencils. Cut the design at home, arrive at the location, execute in minutes, disappear into the night.

His first major solo exhibition took place in 2000 at the Severnshed, a former boat workshop in Bristol's floating harbour. But it was the move to London that same year that placed him at the centre of a new movement. Shoreditch at the time was bleak and cheap; taxis wouldn't go there after dark. At the bottom of Leonard Street stood the Dragon Bar, a venue opened in 1998 by Justin Piggott and kept alive by Adi Hall. With graffitied toilets, block parties out back, and an upstairs gallery given free to artists, it became a creative melting pot. Ben Eine worked behind the bar. Guerrilla artists from across the UK converged here to make work, display, spray, drink, and argue into the small hours.

Banksy's first London exhibition was not in a gallery but in the Rivington Street tunnel, a scruffy cut-through beneath a railway line that today houses the Cargo nightclub. Following a pub argument about how easy it would be to stage an unsanctioned show, he returned a week later with buckets of paint, a forged invoice from a fictitious arts organisation, and decorators' signs stolen from a building site. Dressed in overalls, he and his accomplices painted the tunnel walls white, then executed over a dozen stencils — including the Laugh Now chimpanzees and the Flower Thrower — in twenty-five minutes flat. The opening party on 31 May 2000 featured beer and hip-hop from the back of a transit van.

It was at the Dragon Bar, however, that Banksy staged his first proper London show. In December 2002, the venue hosted the inaugural Santa's Ghetto, a squat art concept store featuring work by Banksy and Eine. The event became an annual tradition that ran until 2007, moving to locations across London and eventually to Bethlehem. Santa's Ghetto was the primary outlet for the release of original canvases and limited-edition prints through the collective known as Pictures on Walls — and it is through these events that collectors first gained access to works now commanding vast sums.

The year 2002 also saw Girl with Balloon appear for the first time, stencilled on a wall beneath a flight of steps on Great Eastern Street, London, with the words "THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE" brushed beside it. That same image would later become his most iconic symbol. Meanwhile, his first American solo show, Existencilism, opened at the 33⅓ Gallery in Los Angeles, introducing American audiences to works such as Barcode, Bomb Hugger, and Love Is In The Air. A reduced version of the show travelled to Japan shortly after.

Between 2001 and 2004, Banksy self-published a trilogy of small-format paperbacks that functioned as manifestos and portfolios. Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall (2001) was a pocket-sized collection of stencils and satirical commentary. Existencilism(2002) launched alongside a street show in a Southwark tunnel and opened with the line: "Like most people I have a fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up together." The third volume, Cut It Out, completed the set. These books are now highly sought-after artefacts from a time before the mainstream had noticed.

In July 2003, Banksy staged his first major UK exhibition, Turf War, in a warehouse on Kingsland Road, Dalston. The location was kept secret until the last moment. The show was a riot of installations, graffiti, and live farmyard animals — sheep, pigs, and a bull — all spray-painted in various patterns. Animal rights protesters locked themselves to the pens, shutting the exhibition early. Among the works on display was a painting of Winston Churchill suspended from the ceiling, and a Madonna reinterpretation that would become an enduring motif. A recently rediscovered BBC interview from this period captured the artist at work, casually confirming his first name as "Robbie."

The global scale of his ambition became clear in 2004 when he secretly entered the Louvre in Paris and hung his own version of the Mona Lisa, altered with a yellow smiley face, on the wall. It was an audacious institutional prank, but it was his trip to the West Bank the following year that gave his work a new political gravity. In 2005, he travelled to the Israeli West Bank barrier and painted nine murals directly onto the concrete slabs, including a dove wearing a flak jacket and a child digging a hole through the wall. The images blended protest with poetry and became some of his most cited works.

October 2005 saw Crude Oils, a two-day exhibition in a basement in west London, featuring over 200 live rats scurrying freely around the space and "remixed" versions of canonical masterpieces — a Monet, a Van Gogh, and Jack Vettriano's The Singing Butler all reworked with irreverent additions. Admission was free if you could stomach the company.

By 2006, word had spread far beyond Shoreditch. That September, Barely Legal opened in a vast warehouse in Los Angeles, billed as a "three-day vandalised warehouse extravaganza." The centrepiece was a 37-year-old Indian elephant named Tai, painted from head to tail in a red-and-gold wallpaper pattern to symbolise the "elephant in the room" — the global poverty that polite society ignores. Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Jude Law attended. Street art had officially entered the mainstream.

Two years later, in 2008, Banksy organised The Cans Festival in a dank tunnel beneath Waterloo Station in London. He invited dozens of street artists from around the world to paint the walls, transforming a forbidding space into an authorised graffiti gallery. That same year, the artist took over his hometown museum in the blockbuster exhibition Banksy versus Bristol Museum. He replaced historical artefacts with animatronic sculptures and satirical interventions — a burnt-out ice-cream van, a sculpture of a CCTV camera as a bird of prey. The show drew over 300,000 visitors.

In 2010, Banksy directed and released his first feature-length documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop. The film told the story of Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in Los Angeles who compulsively filmed street artists but failed to do anything with the footage. When Guetta's edit proved incomprehensible, Banksy took control and crafted a narrative that charted Guetta's own rise as the art-world phenomenon "Mr Brainwash." The film earned an Academy Award nomination. Critics still debate whether it was a genuine documentary or an elaborate prank. Banksy has never clarified.

October 2013 saw a month-long "residency on the streets of New York" titled Better Out Than In. Every day, a new piece appeared somewhere across the five boroughs, announced via Instagram, triggering a city-wide treasure hunt. The works were accompanied by an audio-guide phone number that offered ironic commentary. On Day 13, Banksy set up a stall in Central Park and sold signed original canvases for $60 each. A handful of passers-by bought them. Total sales: $420. The estimated street value of those works at the time was roughly $225,000.

Next came his darkest and most ambitious installation. In August 2015, Banksy transformed a derelict seaside lido in Weston-super-Mare into Dismaland, a "bemusement park" and dystopian anti-Disneyland. Cinderella's carriage had crashed. Orcas jumped through hoops into toilet bowls. An anarchist training camp offered classes in how to break into bus billboards. The staff were instructed to be deliberately apathetic. Dismaland featured work from 58 artists, including Damien Hirst and Jenny Holzer, and drew 150,000 visitors over five weeks. After closing, the building materials were repurposed as shelters for refugees in the Calais Jungle.

In March 2017, the artist opened The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, a nine-room boutique guesthouse facing the concrete slabs and barbed wire of the Israeli West Bank barrier. Every room has what Banksy called "the worst view in the world." The interiors are covered in original works — a Palestinian and an Israeli locked in a pillow fight, surveillance cameras repurposed as decorative motifs. The presidential suite features a jacuzzi fed by a water tank speckled with bullet holes. It is simultaneously a hotel, an art installation, and a political statement. Rooms book out months in advance.

On 5 October 2018, the canvas Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby's London for £1.04 million. The moment the gavel fell, a hidden shredder built into the frame activated, and the painting began sliding through blades, half-destroying itself before a stunned auction room. Banksy posted a video of himself installing the shredder years earlier, captioned: "In case it was ever put up for auction." The buyer kept the work. Renamed Love is in the Bin, it resold in 2021 for £18.6 million — the most expensive piece ever sold by the artist.

In 2019, facing a trademark dispute from a greeting-card company, Banksy opened Gross Domestic Product, a shop in Croydon that never actually opened its doors. The window display featured the artist's version of household goods — from a disco ball made of a police riot helmet to a doormat stitched with the slogan "Welcome to Hell." The store was created solely to satisfy legal requirements around the use of his brand, turning litigation into yet another artwork.

The pandemic years brought some of Banksy's most tender and urgent works. In May 2020, a new painting appeared at Southampton General Hospital: a boy playing with a nurse superhero doll, with Batman and Spider-Man figures discarded in a bin beside him. Titled Game Changer, it was accompanied by a note reading: "Thanks for all you're doing." When auctioned in 2021, it fetched £16.8 million, with all proceeds donated to the National Health Service. Later that year, Aachoo!!, a mural of an old woman sneezing with enough force to blow off her dentures, appeared on a house in Bristol.

In November 2022, Banksy travelled to Ukraine to paint seven murals in and around war-torn towns including Kyiv, Borodyanka, and Irpin. The works were acts of solidarity. The Gymnast showed a young girl doing a handstand on a heap of rubble from a destroyed tower block. The Judo Throw depicted a small boy flipping a large adult man resembling Vladimir Putin. Woman in Gas Mask appeared on a wall in Hostomel, her image both a record of daily reality and a gesture of defiance.

The summer of 2023 brought Cut & Run in Glasgow, the artist's first authorised solo show in fourteen years. For the first time, Banksy revealed the original stencils used to create his most famous images, displaying them as artworks in their own right. The show was a meditation on process, offering a rare glimpse behind the curtain of a career built on secrecy.

August 2024 saw the London Zoo Series, a nine-day animal trail across the capital. It began with a mountain goat perched precariously on a wall near Kew Bridge. Each day, a new animal stencil appeared — monkeys, elephants, wolves, piranhas on a police sentry box — building a bestiary of urban life. The sequence culminated on Day 9 with a gorilla at London Zoo, lifting a shutter to release a sea lion and birds into the night. The series was a playful reminder that even a sprawling city remains a habitat.

In September 2025, a mural appeared on the Queen's Building at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, depicting a judge striking a protestor. Painted without permission, the work was swiftly removed by authorities owing to the building's listed status, but its message about the justice system had already been widely circulated online.

Identity & the Dragon Bar's Legacy

The identity question has never been definitively resolved, and that is central to the project. Investigative journalism has long pointed to a Bristol-born artist named Robin Gunningham. A 2003 BBC interview captured the artist confirming his first name as "Robbie." DJ Goldie once referred to a friend called "Rob," and Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja has frequently been linked to the work. The artist himself has never confirmed any theory, and the refusal to do so has become an artistic statement in its own right.

The Dragon Bar, where so much of this began, closed its doors in 2008 after a fire swept through the premises. It never reopened. In the years since, those who were there have come to recognise the bar as a moment in art history. A 300-page oral history now documents the story through contributions from Banksy, Eine, Faile, Invader, Mode 2, Sweet Toof, Aiko, James Jessop, and many more. It captures what the regulars always knew: in a shabby room above a pub in Shoreditch, with gloriously graffitied toilets and a loose grip on rules, a new movement was born.

Today, Banksy's Instagram following runs into the millions, and a new stencil on a city wall remains an international news event. The work continues to appear without warning, in places of conflict and on the sides of hospitals, always anonymous, always impossible to ignore. The definitive account of the world's most elusive artist may never be written — and perhaps that is exactly how it is intended to remain.