Banksy's 6 most iconic artworks

 

Banksy, Girl With Balloon

Banksy is less of an artist than a global phenomenon. He’s an anonymous graffiti superhero whose identity is endlessly debated by armchair conspiracy theorists; a political gadfly, weighing in on everything from the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to Brexit; and pure art-market gold, with recent work selling at auction for upwards of $1 million.

“He speaks for a generation,” said Maeve Doyle, artistic director of London’s Maddox Gallery. She’s fascinated by the way Banksy—once a sort of creative outlaw—has now been fully embraced by the straightlaced establishment. “As with everything in the art world, counterculture eventually becomes mainstream,” she said. But such populism isn’t always a bad thing. “If you go to Mexico, mechanics will know Banksy,” Doyle continued. “It’s wonderful.”

Banksy’s career has been marked by experimentation, risk, and a daring playfulness. His stencil-heavy motifs—of rats, cops, and kids with balloons—have simply become part of a shared cultural vocabulary, reproduced (and ripped off) with abandon. While it’s exceedingly difficult to narrow down a handful of works that define his aesthetic, we present below a selection of six projects that capture the artist’s hugely influential practice.

Napalm, 2004

One of Banksy’s most harrowing motifs is an image of Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald happily skipping along while flanking a naked, crying young girl. The figure here is a familiar one—even if many viewers might not immediately place her as the subject of a 1972 photograph from the Vietnam War.

Napalm is Banksy at his most unforgiving and in-your-face; the co-optation of the icons of cultural fantasy and modern capitalism place this work firmly alongside the agitprop aesthetic of Adbusters magazine. Artists have long conscripted pop icons to make subversive or satirical points, and this mash-up between apparent innocence and utter horror is what gives Napalm its charge. It’s also what sets Banksy apart from an artist like KAWS, who also incorporates kid-friendly figures like Elmo or Spongebob Squarepants in his work. An older generation of collectors, said Doyle, buy KAWS to “look cool to their kids. But it’s still Sesame Street—they don’t really get it. Whereas Banksy’s an interventionist. It’s political, it looks like political campaigning.”

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