LONDON — Street artist Banksy has grabbed attention this summer with a spectacular series of London artworks that has delighted and confounded the city's residents and visitors alike.
Banksy — whose real identity remains unknown despite more than two decades in the public eye — has been unveiling stencils and installations depicting animals at different spots around the city every day for more than a week, announcing them on Instagram.
The works, all but one of them painted stencils in public spaces, have left his fans and art critics guessing as to their meaning, appearing soon after the worst far-right riots in more than 10 years rocked cities and towns across the United Kingdom. They have once more catapulted the artist back into the center of the country's cultural conversation.
"There's strong evidence over the years that Banksy sees himself as a political artist and has a resonance in political terms in almost everything that he does," says Andrew Renton, a professor of curating at Goldsmiths University of London, one of Britain's most high-profile arts institutions. "And it's kind of interesting, because the works that have appeared in the past week are in many ways not political."
On Aug. 5, a black goat materialized on an old industrial building in southwest London. Then the following day, two elephants appeared — as if talking to one another through bricked up windows — at the end of a row of houses in nearby Chelsea. Monkeys were seen stenciled swinging across a bridge near an East London public transit station. And a wolf was painted on a satellite dish in South London — then dramatically stolen by several masked men who moved quickly with a ladder and a getaway van but were filmed on a bystander's cellphone.
A week ago, in the northeast of London, a painted pair of pelicans were spotted perched above a fish-and-chips shop, as though wolfing down fish on the storefront's signage. The next day, a cat adorned an abandoned billboard on a lonely stretch of road and then a glass police box in the heart of the city's financial district was transformed overnight into a fish tank.
The final two pieces in the series included a mural of a rhino that appeared to be climbing atop an abandoned car, and a gorilla on shutters outside London's largest zoo that was lifting up a curtain to allow a seal and several birds to escape captivity.
Besides the theft, some pieces since their appearance have been defaced by other graffiti artists, moved by local authorities to safer locations or taken down altogether.
"It's kind of illusion magic, and that's what draws you in," says Renton. "It's not high flying, it's not deeply philosophical, it's not hard. The accessibility is what gives him a tool to communicate."
Banksy published photographs of each of the works on his Instagram account, allowing him to reach a much larger global audience — with more than 13 million followers — than was possible when he was spray-painting buildings in Bristol, England, back in the 1990s.
But he has also produced paintings and prints for commercial work, donating much of the money he earns from sales to philanthropic causes that seem to dovetail with the social criticism often reflected in his work, themes that have included U.K. politics, Israel's war in Gaza and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
There is no clear reason or explanation for this animal-focused art series, but some have speculated it could be in reference to the recent riots as an indication that eventually humanity has the power to destroy itself and cities like London could eventually return to nature. Another suggestion, posited by a BBC presenter, is that Banksy cares deeply about the environment, animal welfare and broader ecological issues, so the final image of a gorilla releasing other animals should apply retroactively to all the creatures in the previous images.
"He puts situations together which are at first, playful and comical, and humorous," says art dealer and curator Acoris Andipa, who runs the London-based Andipa Gallery and sells Banksys worldwide. "People laugh, and then suddenly, draw, you know, suck between their teeth and just go, 'Ouch, that's got a sting to it.' It's a conversation starter."
Andipa sold his first Banksy work in the mid-2000s, and has since sold hundreds of Banksy's paintings and thousands of prints. With his knowledge of the commercial market for Banksy's work, he says the recent London series may once more remind people of the artist's existence, but is unlikely to inflate prices for the existing work significantly.
The controversial nature of much of Banksy's work not only criticizes public positions or government actions, but also challenges the art market and its participants — often adding to its allure.
"The anti-establishment theme that's been so strong in a lot of Banksy's prints, a lot of people really like that — poking fun at the art world, which there are sort of participating in," says Jasper Tordoff, a Banksy specialist at a company called My Art Broker that bills itself as the largest private secondhand dealer of the artist's work. "That's, again, something that collectors really enjoy."
Tordoff says Banksy's continued anonymity in some ways inures the artist to the pushback that confrontational stances might occasionally provoke.
"He's hiding behind this mask: If his identity was revealed, I think it would be much easier to say, 'I don't like that stance,'" Tordoff says. "Immediately you would associate, you would know much more about them."
Almost everyone in the art world has a theory about Banksy's real identity, a 20-plus-year mystery that's prompted British tabloids to offer large sums of money for anyone that might help them solve it.
For Andipa, who says he has never met the artist in person but knows many people who have, Banksy's continued success at retaining anonymity relies on several factors, including building strong relationships within an inner circle, a Robin Hood-like reputation as a philanthropist, and a certain secretive romance with street art installations.
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