Love
Is In The Air (Flower Thrower)

Love is in the Air or Flower Thrower is one of the most popular Banksy prints, originally created in response to the construction of the West Bank wall in Bethlehem. The large-scale motif was stencilled onto the 760km wall that separates Palestine from Israel.

The wall, as Banksy put it, “essentially turns Palestine into the world’s largest open prison,” and it rapidly became a giant canvas for paintings and writings protesting its construction.

Banksy returned to the region in 2005 to paint a series of nine provocative works supporting freedom and equality. In 2015 he intervened again, painting four new pieces among the ruins of a bombed city with the intention of highlighting the plight of the people living in the Gaza Strip. In 2017, he opened the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, which boasts the ‘worst view in the world’.

Rendered in Banksy’s characteristic style, Love Is In The Air depicts a young man, dressed as a militant, wearing a baseball cap and a bandana to mask the lower half of his face, in the middle of throwing a grenade or molotov cocktail. However, in an inevitable Banksy twist, the artist places a bunch of flowers into the thrower’s hand instead. Despite the overt anger and aggression in his posture, the figure now prepares to launch a universal symbol of love and peace as opposed to a weapon.