How Banksy built a successful career. Explore key moments that defined the journey.
Banksy is a pseudonymous and unconfirmed England-based street artist, political activist, and film director known for satirical street art and subversive epigrams. His identity remains a mystery. His stenciled graffiti, often containing dark humor, serves as political and social commentary, appearing on streets and walls globally. Emerging from the Bristol underground scene in the 1990s, his art reflects collaboration between artists and musicians. He credits 3D from Massive Attack as an inspiration.
Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist around 1990 as part of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ) with Kato and Tes. He was inspired by local artists and was part of the Bristol underground scene.
In 1993, Banksy's artwork appeared on two cassette sleeves for the Bristol band Mother Samosa, featuring Gunningham's signature.
Banksy ended as a freehand graffiti artist around 1994 as part of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ) with Kato and Tes. He was inspired by local artists and was part of the Bristol underground scene.
In April 2007, Transport for London painted over Banksy's image of a scene from Quentin Tarantino's film 'Pulp Fiction' released in 1994. The image featured Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas.
In 1997, Banksy's first known large wall mural, The Mild Mild West, was painted to cover advertising on Stokes Croft in Bristol. It depicts a teddy bear lobbing a Molotov cocktail at riot police.
Around 2000, Banksy turned to stencilling after realizing how much less time it took to complete a work, claiming he made the change while hiding from the police.
On 19 July 2002, Banksy's first Los Angeles exhibition, entitled 'Existencilism, an Exhibition of Art, Lies and Deviousness,' debuted at 33 1⁄3 Gallery in Silver Lake. The exhibition was curated by multiple parties and included paintings such as 'Smiley Copper H (2002),' 'Leopard and Barcode (2002),' 'Bomb Hugger (2002),' and 'Love Is in the Air (2002)'.
In 2002, Banksy produced artwork for the Greenpeace campaign Save or Delete.
In 2003, Banksy, along with Shepard Fairey, Dmote, and others, created work at a warehouse exhibition in Alexandria, Sydney, for Semi-Permanent, attended by approximately 1,500 people.
In a 2003 interview, Banksy described his technique, when making a piece in a public area, as "quick" and "I want to get it done and dusted."
In August 2004, Banksy produced spoof British £10 notes featuring Diana, Princess of Wales's head instead of the Queen's and changing 'Bank of England' to 'Banksy of England.' These were thrown into a crowd at Notting Hill Carnival, and some were used in local shops. They were also given with invitations to a Santa's Ghetto exhibition. They have since been selling on eBay.
In 2004, Banksy created a limited edition screenprint titled 'Napalm (Can't Beat That Feeling),' appropriating the image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc from the 1972 photograph 'The Terror of War,' placing her with Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse against an empty background.
In February 2007, the sale of Banksy's 'Untitled (2004)' reached £33,600, significantly above price estimates, at a Sotheby's auction.
In August 2005, Banksy created nine images on the Israeli West Bank wall during a trip to the Palestinian territories.
In 2005, Banksy's subverted paintings were shown at a twelve-day exhibition in Westbourne Grove, London. These included a modified version of Monet's Water Lily Pond with urban detritus and a reimagining of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.
In 2005, Banksy's work critiqued the environmental impacts of big businesses, including his 2005 work Show me the Monet.
In September 2006, Banksy held an exhibition called 'Barely Legal' in Los Angeles. It featured a live elephant painted in pink and gold floral wallpaper, meant to draw attention to world poverty. The elephant appeared unpainted on the final day after complaints from animal rights activists.
On 19 October 2006, a set of Kate Moss paintings sold in Sotheby's London for £50,400, setting an auction record for Banksy's work. The stencil of a green Mona Lisa with paint dripping from her eyes sold for £57,600 at the same auction.
In February 2007, the owners of a house in Bristol with a Banksy mural on the side decided to sell the house through Red Propeller art gallery because prospective buyers wanted to remove the mural. It was listed as a mural that comes with a house attached.
On 21 February 2007, Sotheby's auction house in London auctioned three works, reaching the highest ever price for a Banksy work at auction: over £102,000 for 'Bombing Middle England'. Two other graffiti works, 'Girl with Balloon' and 'Bomb Hugger', sold for £37,200 and £31,200 respectively. The following day's auction saw further Banksy works reach soaring prices. To coincide, Banksy updated his website with a new image of an auction house scene.
In April 2007, Transport for London painted over Banksy's image of a scene from Quentin Tarantino's film 'Pulp Fiction', featuring Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas. Banksy repainted the same site, initially with real guns but then adorned with banana costumes. Later, Banksy made a tribute artwork for graffiti artist Ozone.
On 27 April 2007, a new record high for the sale of Banksy's work was set with the auction of the work Space Girl and Bird fetching £288,000 (US$576,000).
In October 2007, at a Bonhams auction house in London, a limited run of 50 signed posters containing ten uncut spoof banknotes produced by Banksy sold for £24,000. These posters commemorated the death of Princess Diana and were initially sold by Pictures on Walls for £100 each in 2004.
As of January 2008, Banksy's Manifesto on his website was replaced with Graffiti Heroes No. 03, which describes Peter Chappell's graffiti quest of the 1970s that worked to free George Davis from imprisonment.
In March 2008, a stencilled graffiti work, widely attributed to Banksy, appeared on a Thames Water tower in the middle of the Holland Park roundabout, depicting a child painting the tag "Take this—Society!" in bright orange. London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham spokesman, Councillor Greg Smith branded the art as vandalism, and ordered its immediate removal.
In April 2008, Banksy painted "One Nation Under CCTV".
Over the weekend 3–5 May 2008, Banksy hosted an exhibition called The Cans Festival. It was situated on Leake Street, a road tunnel formerly used by Eurostar underneath London Waterloo station. Graffiti artists with stencils were invited to join in and paint their own artwork.
In late August 2008, marking the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the associated levee failure disaster, Banksy produced a series of works in New Orleans, Louisiana, mostly on buildings derelict since the disaster.
Banksy's first official exhibition in New York City, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill, opened on 5 October 2008. The animatronic pets in the store window included a mother hen watching over her baby Chicken McNuggets as they pecked at a barbecue sauce packet, and a rabbit putting makeup on in a mirror.
In May 2009, Banksy parted company with agent Steve Lazarides and announced that Pest Control, the handling service who act on his behalf, would be the only point of sale for new works.
On 13 June 2009, the Banksy vs Bristol Museum show opened at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, featuring more than 100 works of art, including animatronics and installations. Over the course of the twelve weeks, the exhibition was visited over 300,000 times.
By August 2009 Banksy was relying on Emo Philips' quote "When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised God doesn't work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness."
In September 2009, a Banksy work parodying the Royal Family was partially destroyed by Hackney Council after they served an enforcement notice for graffiti removal to the former address of the property owner. The mural had been commissioned for the 2003 Blur single "Crazy Beat".
In December 2009, Banksy marked the end of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference by painting four murals on global warming. One included the phrase, "I don't believe in global warming", with the words being submerged in water.
In 2009, Banksy created "Devolved Parliament", depicting Members of Parliament as chimpanzees in the House of Commons.
In March 2010, a modified version of the work Forgive Us Our Trespassing–a kneeling boy with a spray-painted halo–was displayed at London Bridge Station on a poster. After a few days the halo was repainted by a graffitist, so Transport for London disposed of the poster.
In May 2010, seven new Banksy works of art appeared in Toronto, Canada.
Banksy was credited with the opening couch gag for the 2010 The Simpsons episode "MoneyBart", depicting people working in deplorable conditions and using endangered or mythical animals to make both the episodes cel-by-cel and the merchandise connected with the program.
In 2010, Banksy's documentary film 'Exit Through the Gift Shop', which he directed and starred in, made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival.
In January 2011, Banksy published the original storyboard for The Simpsons episode "MoneyBart" on his website.
In January 2011, Banksy's documentary film 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film.
In late January 2011, Exit Through the Gift Shop was nominated for a 2010 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Banksy released a statement about the nomination. Leading up to the Oscars, Banksy blanketed Los Angeles with street art.
In early March 2011, Banksy responded to the Oscars with an artwork in Weston-super-Mare, UK, of a little girl holding the Oscar and pouting.
In May 2011 Banksy released a lithographic print which showed a smoking petrol bomb contained in a 'Tesco Value' bottle. The posters were sold exclusively at the Bristol Anarchists Bookfair in Stokes Croft for £5 each.
Exit Through the Gift Shop was broadcast on British public television station Channel 4 on 13 August 2011 as part of a night of other shows compiled by Banksy.
In October 2013, Banksy's New York residency concluded after a month of daily installations; many of the pieces were vandalized, removed, or stolen by the end of the residency.
On 1 October 2013, Banksy began a one-month "show on the streets of New York City", for which he opened a separate website and granted an interview to The Village Voice via his publicist.
In 2013, a work titled The Banality of the Banality of Evil was sold for an undisclosed amount after a failed auction to support an anti-homelessness charity in New York.
Two of the canvasses from the Fifth Avenue pop-up boutique in October 2013, were sold at a July 2014 auction for $214,000.
In 2014, an artwork on a doorway titled Mobile Lovers was sold £403,000 to keep a youth club in Bristol open.
In February 2015, Banksy released a video about his trip to the Gaza Strip and painted artworks, including a kitten on the remains of a destroyed house, aiming to highlight the destruction in Gaza.
On August 21, 2015, Banksy opened Dismaland, a large-scale group show modeled on Disneyland, which lampooned disappointing temporary themed attractions in the UK.
On September 27, 2015, Dismaland permanently closed. In December, Banksy created several murals in the vicinity of Calais, France, including a piece depicting Steve Jobs as a migrant.
In 2015, a Banksy work depicting a little boy holding a can of red paint next to the words "I remember when all this was trees" was sold for $137,500.
In 2015, a sculpture titled Dream Boat, which was exhibited in Dismaland.
In 2017, Banksy created paintings titled Mediterranean Sea View which were Romantic-era paintings of the seashore that have been modified with images of lifebuoys and orange life jackets washed up on the shore, a reference to the European migrant crisis.
In 2017, Banksy donated Civilian Drone Strike, which was sold at £205,000 to raise funds for Campaign Against Arms Trade and Reprieve.
In 2017, Banksy financed the creation of the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, marking the 100th anniversary of British control of Palestine. The hotel features rooms designed by various artists and houses a contemporary art gallery.
In October 2018, Banksy's 'Balloon Girl' was sold for £1m at Sotheby's in London. As the gavel hit, the canvas partially shredded itself via a shredder hidden within the frame, in what was described as a major prank in art history.
In 2018, Banksy created a piece live at Sotheby's auction. The artwork, originally Girl with Balloon, was partially shredded by a mechanism built into the frame, creating a new artwork titled Love is in the Bin.
In 2018, Banksy returned to New York five years after his 'Better Out Than In' residency. Several works were displayed, including a mural of imprisoned Kurdish artist Zehra Doğan.
In 2018, a sculpture titled Dream Boat, which was exhibited in Dismaland in 2015, was raffled off in aid of the NGO Help Refugees (now called Choose Love) for a minimum donation of £2.
In May 2019, the Banksy mural in Port Talbot, originally appearing in December, was moved to a gallery in the town's Ty'r Orsaf building for protection.
In October 2019, a 2009 painting by Banksy entitled "Devolved Parliament" sold at Sotheby's in London for just under £9.9 million.
In early October 2019, Banksy opened a "pop-up shop" named Gross Domestic Product in Croydon, South London. On 4 October, Full Colour Black publicly revealed itself as the greeting card company involved in the trademark dispute.
In 2019, Banksy created merchandise for homeless charities in Bristol.
On 13 February 2020, the Valentine's Banksy mural appeared in Bristol's Barton Hill, depicting a girl firing a slingshot of real red flowers and leaves, which Banksy confirmed as his work on February 14.
In May 2020, Banksy dedicated a painting titled 'Painting for Saints' or 'Game Changer' to NHS staff during the global coronavirus pandemic and donated it to the University Hospital of Southampton.
In May 2020, Banksy gifted a painting titled Game Changer to a hospital as a tribute to National Health Service workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In July 2020, Banksy sold three paintings forming a triptych titled Mediterranean Sea View 2017, which raised £2.2 million for a hospital in Bethlehem. The paintings were originally created for The Walled Off Hotel.
In August 2020, it was revealed that Banksy had privately funded a rescue boat to save refugees at risk in the Mediterranean Sea. The boat was renamed Louise Michel and painted pink with an image of a girl holding a heart-shaped safety float.
In 2020, Show me the Monet painting was later sold for £7.5 million at Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Auction.
In March 2021, Banksy claimed responsibility for the image of an escaping prisoner that appeared on the side of Reading Prison, resembling Oscar Wilde with a typewriter attached to tied bedsheets.
In March 2021, Banksy's Game Changer painting was sold for £14.4m to benefit a number of NHS-related organisations and charities.
On 23 March 2021, Banksy's 'Game Changer' painting, dedicated to NHS staff, was sold for £14.4m (£16.8m including buyer premium), a record for his artwork, with proceeds benefiting NHS-related organizations and charities.
In August 2021, several Banksy artworks, collectively titled A Great British Spraycation, appeared in several East Anglian towns.
On 14 October 2021, the partially shredded painting, now titled 'Love is in the Bin', was resold by Sotheby's for £18,582,000 in London, after the buyer from the 2018 auction decided to go through with the initial purchase.
In November 2022, Banksy confirmed his visit to Ukraine following the Russian invasion by posting images of a mural on a damaged building in Borodianka and six murals in Kyiv, Irpin, Hostomel and Horenka.
In August 2024, Banksy claimed credit for a series of black silhouette compositions with animal themes that appeared in London. The artist declined to comment on the meaning behind these works.
On St Patricks Day, 2024, a Banksy mural appeared near Finsbury Park, featuring a worker using a pressure washer to create the artwork on a wall next to a heavily pruned tree. The artwork's green shades match Islington's municipal green. The local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, visited the mural. Experts believe the location makes it difficult to remove for auction.
In February 2025, it was announced that Banksy, or a representative, would appear at a tribunal at the U.K's Intellectual Property Office, marking a rare public appearance for the artist's legal team.
In May 2025, Banksy revealed his latest artwork located in Marseille, France. The mural depicts a lighthouse.
In 2025, the BBC unearthed previously unseen Banksy murals in a youth club in the artist's home city that differ from his well-known stencil style, showcasing his early technique.
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