Banksy is a modern British street artist, painter, filmmaker, and all-purpose provocateur activist who, despite his international fame, has maintained an anonymous identity. Street art and graffiti are often considered to be criminal acts, thus, in the beginning, the artists tend to stay anonymous to avoid any trouble, and eventually, the anonymity created its own natural buzz. Banksy initially got noticed for spray-painting trains and walls in his home town of Bristol, his career began as a freehand graffiti artist with the DryBreadZ Crew, after which he joined The Wild Bunch in the early 1990s. Initially, his artwork was mainly seen in Bristol, however, in the 2000s his artworks started appearing all over the United Kingdom and different parts of the globe. Banksy’s work is renowned for delivering political messages, for example, in 2018 he made a piece showing a boy catching what appears to be snowflakes but is, in fact, ash from a fire. The painting portrayed the problem of pollution.
When he was 18, Banksy settled on his distinctive stencil approach to graffiti. He once wrote that while he and his friends were painting a train, the British Transport Police showed up and everyone ran. “The rest of my mates made it to the car,” Banksy recalled, “and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there listening to the cops on the tracks, I realized I had to cut my painting time in half or give it up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stenciled plate on the bottom of the fuel tank when I realized I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high.”
Banksy eventually traveled the world, his 1st London exhibition, so to speak, took place in Rivington Street in 2001. Then in 2004-2005, Banksy brought his own brand of prankster performance art to major museums, including the Louvre. There, he succeeded in putting in a picture of the Mona Lisa remodeled with a smiley-face sticker. In New York City, he sneakily attached a small portrait of a lady to a wall in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In August, Israel, he painted a series of pictures on the West Bank’s concrete wall.
In October 2018, a painting by Banksy sold at Sotheby’s auction house in London for £1.04 million. Shortly after the item was declared as sold, a beeping alarm went off and the canvas began to pass through a shredder installed in the frame, shredding half of it. “It appears we just got Banksy-ed,” reported Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s senior director and head of Contemporary Art in Europe. The painting was a famous Banksy print known as “Girl with Balloon” created in 2006. Banksy’s balloon girl, which was voted UK’s best-loved work of art in 2017, became the first instance of a self-destructing painting.