By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realising how much less time it took to complete a work. He said: “When I was 18 I spent a night trying to paint LATE AGAIN in big silver bubble letters on the side of a passenger train. British Transport police showed up and I got ripped to shreds running away through a thorny bush. The rest of my mates made it to the car and disappeared, so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper truck with engine oil leaking all over me . . . I realised I had to cut my painting time in half or give up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stencilled plate on the bottom of the fuel tank which I realised I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high.”
Banksy’s stencils feature striking and humorous images that generally transcend language. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment. Subjects often include rats, apes, policemen, soldiers, children and the elderly. Banksy continued his graffiti work but increasingly began selling print work. A set of Kate Moss paintings sold in Sotheby’s for £50,400 in 2006. That year, the journalist Max Foster coined the phrase “the Banksy effect”, to illustrate how interest in other street artists was growing on the back of his commercial success. In 2009, Banksy parted company with his now agent Lazarides and announced that Pest Control, would act on his behalf and be the only point of sale for new works.
In 2018, Banksy’s Balloon Girl, was sold in an auction at Sotheby’s in London for £1.04m. However, shortly after the gavel dropped and it was sold, an alarm sounded inside of the picture frame and the canvas passed through a shredder hidden within the frame, partially shredding the picture. The prank received worldwide news coverage with one newspaper stating that it was “quite possibly the biggest prank in art history.”
The woman who won the bidding at the auction decided to go through with the purchase. The partially shredded work was given a new title, Love is in the Bin, and was officially authenticated by Pest Control. Sothebys released a statement that said: “Banksy didn’t destroy an artwork in the auction, he created one” and called it “the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction.” Three years later, the half-shredded painting was sold at Sotheby’s for £18.6 million.
Buy Banksy artwork from mainstream galleries here and visit Pest Control.
