Banksy: Biography & Artwork

Banksy

Bristol-based graffiti writer turned international market leader, Banksy is a major player in the urban and contemporary scene. We offer free and confidential valuations and market advice on any Banksy print, with zero obligation to sell. If you're looking to buy or sell prints & editions, browse the artist's portfolio and enquire today.

Biography

The art world’s agent provocateur in chief, Banksy, has gone from Bristol-based graffiti writer to international Street Art sensation. The artist’s personal biography is relatively unknown and the question still remains, who is Banksy? Despite Banksy's anonymity, his subversive works have acted as a mouthpiece for the artist's stance on social issues, boosting him to the top of the Urban Art scene.

Inspired by the French graffiti artist, Blek le Rat (real name Xavier Prou), Banksy’s art is both simple and evocative, poking fun through their satirical content. Banksy is well-known for using public buildings to stage his works, but it is his infamous stunts have further cemented him as a household name.

Banksy’s stunts go hand in hand with the most notable works of his career. Such is the case with his groundbreaking Girl with Balloon, which began as a series of murals in 2002 depicting a young girl with her hand reaching for a red, heart-shaped balloon. During a 2018 Sotheby’s auction, Banksy’s Girl with Balloon was shredded before a crowd of stunned onlookers. Now titled Love Is In The Bin, Banksy’s audacious act boosted the artwork’s selling price by 20%, making it the highest-selling Banksy work ever sold at £18.9 million.

Another of Banksy’s most famous artworks is his 2020 Game Changer, which was painted in tribute to the efforts of the NHS against the COVID pandemic. Selling for £16.7 million at auction, the proceeds were donated to the NHS and the painting was hung at the Southampton General Hospital.

Banksy’s 2009 Devolved Parliament is also worthy of note. It is an iconic painting that depicts chimpanzees debating in the House of Commons. A witty, political commentary on the state of British politics, the painting was displayed in Bristol Museum on Brexit Day and served as a fitting reflection of events, even a decade after its execution.

One of the earliest and longest surviving of Banksy’s works, the mural Take The Money And Run, was painted during the early 1990s in collaboration with Bristol graffiti writers Inky and Mobz. It depicts the silhouettes of three thieves and features the New York-inspired graffiti lettering that was extremely popular amongst street artists during that period.
Another notable example of Banksy’s early œuvre is the mural The Mild Mild West. Painted in 1998, it depicts a teddy bear throwing a Molotov cocktail at three police clad in riot gear. In 2002, Banksy stencilled the equally well-known image Gorilla In A Pink Mask onto the wall of a social club in Bristol’s Eastville. The work remained in situ for almost ten years before being inadvertently removed in July 2011.
Banksy’s early freehand pieces, such as Take The Money And Run, were influenced by the graffiti that had appeared in New York during the 1980s, a style made internationally famous by the hip hop film, Wild Style. Many of his early contemporaries, namely graffiti writers 3D, Inkie and Nick Walker, had attempted to recreate these kind of works in their native Bristol. Banksy’s later stencil works bear striking similarity to the street paintings of Parisian artist Xavier Prou, who operates under the pseudonym Blek Le Rat. One of the first street artists in the French capital and a former architecture student, Prou has been creating stencil-based artworks since the early 1980s and is often dubbed the ‘Father of stencil graffiti’.
A producer of deeply satirical art, Banksy has taken great inspiration from canonical artists and their work, including Keith Haring – whose trademark dog he recreates in the piece Choose Your Weapon – and Andy Warhol.
Little is known about the identity of Banksy, with some even claiming that the artist is not one person but rather a collective of individuals. In 2010, Banksy directed the film Exit Through The Gift Shop, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Following the story of Thierry Guetta, a Frenchman living in Los Angeles who sets out to make a documentary about Banksy, many have speculated that the film itself was a publicity stunt, designed to make viewers question the commodification of art in recent years.
Around 70 Banksy print releases have taken place over the last two decades, comprising an estimated 30,000 individual prints. It is assumed that around 10,000 of these are signed by the artist and unsurprisingly, Banksy’s signed works sell for significantly higher than those that are not. It is almost laughable today that back in 2004, upon the original release of his Girl with a Balloon print, 150 signed copies of Banksy’s preeminent motif sold for only £150, with the 600 unsigned going for only £75. In contrast, an edition from this very same series sold for £438,500 at Sotheby’s in 2020, demonstrative of the consistent interest and increase in value ascribed to the artist’s work and his ability to remain relevant.
While Banksy has not released any new prints since Sale Ends V2 in 2017, there is a huge secondary market for both his signed and unsigned works. Another of his popular motifs, the Rat, seen in prints such as Gangsta Rat, (2004) originally released in 2004 as a 750 print series, has only grown in popularity - increasing in value by over 1000% between 2008 - 2020.

What is the key to making returns on a Banksy? Destroying it, apparently. Love Is In The Bin had an incredible increase in value when it returned to auction, in it’s half-shredded condition, at Sotheby’s London on 14 October 2021, and became the most expensive Banksy artwork yet.

Back in 2018, Banksy pulled one of the most famous stunts in art history, when he tried to destroy his painting Girl with Balloon, now Love Is In The Bin, at a Sotheby’s auction. As the hammer went down on an already record-breaking sale of the print, Girl with Balloon slid through a hidden shredder in the frame and produced an altogether new work, as well as a viral auction video. Love Is In The Bin is both the only work of art ever to be created live at auction and Banksy’s all time highest selling piece, achieving almost £18.6 million when it returned to auction in 2021.