Banksy: Wall and Piece

Product Information

Banksy is the world’s most discussed artist of recent decades, and this seminal collection features hundreds of works including Girl with Balloon, Pulp Fiction, Love Is in the Air, Barcode, and Monkey Queen. You Are An Acceptable Level of Threat covers Banksy’s entire street art career, spanning the late ’90s right up to the ‘Seasons Greetings’ Christmas 2018 piece in Port Talbot, Wales. The contributors are drawn from the academic and art worlds, business and media, with a range of ‘vox pop’ reactions. Decades before he blew the lid off the high-stakes art world by shredding a work immediately following its purchase at an auction, Banksy was committing acts of artistic protest on the streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world.

Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist?This copy is from the fourteenth printing and sports a characteristic endorsed sticker indicating that this edition contains 10% more contents. There are so many Banksy works in this book I have never seen before which for me was the real delight in this book. Photographer Ray Mock takes you along on his exciting hunt for new Banksy work during the famous Better Out Than In’ project.

Wall and Piece comprises a three-part series of previously published books by Banksy, including Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, Existencilism, and Cut It Out. This book features approximately eighty works from the start of his street art career to today, most photographed in situ and presented in vibrant illustrations. This yielded an exceptionally fascinating and useful reference work, containing around 200 unique photographs and extensive background information about this historic artistic legacy. Interestingly it notes that the book was created ‘with the cooperation of Pest Control’ and ‘this is as official and authorised as any Banksy publication could be’. These include the Barton Hill Flower Girl image painted just yards from the youth centre where youth worker John Nation inspired Bristol’s original graffiti artists in the mid-1980s and which made a major impact on the young Banksy.Featuring observations and insight, vibrantly illustrated with photography it also includes a timeline spanning his full career to date.

Created in collaboration with Banksy's management company, Pest Control, Banksy is a vast catalogue of the artist's legacy, from his early days of tagging Britain to ambitious projects like Dismaland and The Walled-Off Hotel. The various shapes of the ‘souvenirs’ executed in polymer resin were created by Banksy himself, while he also supervised the graffiti decorations carried out by Palestinian artists. Banksy does not sell photographs or reproductions of his street graffiti, but art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder.Where its predecessor featured in-depth analysis of each piece displayed, Desperately Seeking B**ksy offers accessibility and brevity for the more casual fan. In this beautifully designed collection, graffiti artist KET showcases some of the best street art from around the globe, as well as a selection of the enigmatic Banksy's own inspirational work.

These books are a successful attempt to mimic the style of Banksy’s trio of pocket sized books from 2001 to 2004. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, and has been part of more than a hundred solo and group exhibitions, both in Italy and abroad. Mix the irony and juxtaposition of John Yates with the beauty of the finest aerosol art, and you’ll have some idea of how good this really is.Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. There have been many celebratory books about Banksy, but this is the first non-partisan documentation of the Bristol event and an attempt to assess its local and wider impact.