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That tension between anonymity and public scrutiny has helped keep the Banksy story alive for decades. Since emerging from the Bristol scene in the 1990s, Banksy has built a body of work that mixes anti-establishment politics, visual wit and carefully staged public interventions. His pieces have appeared on city walls, in conflict zones, at festivals and inside the art market he often mocks. In 2024 he confirmed a mural in Finsbury Park, north London, showing a stencilled figure holding a pressure washer beside a heavily pruned tree, with green paint sprayed across the wall to resemble the tree’s missing canopy. The work drew immediate crowds and was widely interpreted as a comment on environmental damage and the uneasy relationship between urban life and nature.
