Design Presentation - Banksy

I chose to do my presentation on the artwork of Banksy - an anonymous England based graffiti artist & political activist.

His art has been featured on streets, walls and bridges of cities throughout the world.

Banksys work was born out of the Bristol underground scene as a free and graffiti artist in the early 90’s. By 200 he had turned his style to the art of stencilling after realising how much less time it took to complete a piece. He reckons he changed to stencilling whilst he was hiding from the police under a rubbish lorry when he noticed a stencilled serial number so he started using this  technique he soon became widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London. He also states that he was also too slow and was either caught or could never finish the art in one sitting, stensils are a lot quicker to use.

Banksys works have dealt with an array of political and social themes such as anti-war, anti-capitalism, ant-fascism with additionaly the compnants of the human condition such as greed, poverty, hypocrisy, boredom, despair, and alienation.

In august 2004 Banksy produced a quantity of fake 10 pound notes where he substituted the queens head for Diana and changed the text “bank of England” to “banksy of England”. Somehow a lot of the fake notes got out at the notting hill carnival and Reading Festival that year, which some people tried to use at local shops. Since this happened these notes have became available on eBay for 200 pound each.

In August 2005, Banksy took a trip to the Palestine territories, creating nine images on the Israeli west bank wall which seperates the Israeli and Palestine populations.

In april 2006, Banksy created a sculpture based on a crumpled red phone box with a pickaxe in its side and placed it in an alley way in London.

The same year banksy replaced up to 500 copies of Paris Hiltons debut cd in 48 differnt sotres in the uk with his own art and remixes by danger mouse, the track names were changed to ‘why am i famous’,’what have i done’ ect. Several copies were brought from stores before they could be removed, some are now going for 750 pounds on ebay . the cover art depicted.