Banksy

Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist, and filmmaker active since the 1990s. Emerging from the Bristol underground scene, his work developed alongside the Bristol underground movement and the DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ). He adopted stencilling as his primary medium in the late 1990s, using it to execute satirical street art on public surfaces in Bristol, London, and international cities.

In 2005, Banksy created a series of nine stencilled images on the Palestinian side of the West Bank barrier. That same year, he clandestinely installed altered artworks on the walls of major public institutions, including the British Museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The British Museum subsequently acquired his altered banknote print, Di-faced Tenners, for its permanent collection of coins and medals in 2019.

Banksy expanded into documentary filmmaking in 2010 with the release of Exit Through the Gift Shop. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, and it received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature in 2011. In 2015, he constructed Dismaland, a temporary large-scale public art installation in the seaside resort town of Weston-super-Mare, England. Two years later, in 2017, he established The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, adjacent to the West Bank barrier.

In 2018, the artist orchestrated an intervention during an auction at Sotheby's in London, where his canvas Girl with Balloon passed through a shredder concealed within the frame moments after the final bid, creating a modified work retitled Love is the Bin. During the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020, Banksy donated the painting Game Changer to Southampton General Hospital to raise funds for the National Health Service. His works are preserved in the permanent collections of public institutions, including the British Museum and the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.