Banksy

An international icon, Banksy has cloaked his true identity for decades, but that hasn’t stopped him becoming the best-known street artist of our time. Elevating stencilling to a fine art, he has a talent for sneaking up on cities to create his provocative works, using his dark humour to make statements on current crises, conflicts and social injustices. “There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place,” he says.

His prolific output and legendary status in street art history have made him eminently collectable. And while it is his record-breaking prices at auction that dominate the headlines, Banksy editions and prints are also available at more affordable price points, ensuring a large and diverse collector base for his work.

Banksy first started creating street art in his home city of Bristol in the early 1990s. At the time, graffiti was considered an act of vandalism and, aged just 18, he was almost apprehended by police while spray-painting a train. To avoid being caught in the future, he turned to stencilling, a more practical method for replicating his work that quickly became his signature. Shortly after moving to London in 1999, he held his first exhibition in a railway tunnel in Shoreditch, followed, in 2003, by his breakout show ‘Turf-War’ in Hackney.

Relentlessly controlling his own narrative, Banksy set up the organisation Pest Control in 2008 to authenticate his work while enabling him to remain elusive. Despite his anonymity, he manages to pull off remarkable public stunts like the infamous shredding of Girl with Balloon at a Sotheby’s auction in London in 2018 and curate major exhibitions like ‘Cut and Run’, which popped up overnight in Glasgow in summer 2023.