A British artist (
Bristol), he is one of the leading and most controversial figures on the contemporary art scene.
His strategy of working
in the shadows and not revealing his biographical identity is a necessary and unbreakable condition in order to escape any kind of control.
Banksy has built his popularity on
invisibility.
Best known for his street paintings, Banksy has used different methods to develop his conception of art as protest and disobedience to the system. In the subjects of his
murals, paintings, and prints, the artist always inserts a seemingly incongruous and disorienting note.
He thus succeeds in capturing and drawing our attention and in prompting us to
take a closer look at what is in front of us in order to understand its meaning.
What ultimately matters to Banksy is not so much the form as the
message; despite this, he has managed to create, on a formal level, an immediately recognisable and multicultural personal language, mainly through the use of the stencil technique in his artwork.
His messages of protest are metaphors about the world and society in which we live (war, conformism, migration, consumerism) which reach out directly and strike at the heart, above all among the younger generations.
text by Gianni Mercurio, independent curator, essayist, and expert on American art, he has curated individual exhibitions on Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Segal, Roy Lichtenstein and group exhibitions on Pop-Art, Hyperrealism, and American Graffiti.
