For more than 35 years, the anonymous counterculture artist Banksy has festooned the world’s streets with his satiric and whimsical artwork skewering everything from war and weapons to pop culture and politics.
But how much does the American public really know about Banksy, the street name for the artist who started out in 1990 painting graffiti around his native Bristol, England, and now sits atop an estimated $50 million global fortune?
San Diegans can explore the life, work and artistic mission of Banksy beginning Friday at “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits,” an international touring exhibition in residence at the Del Mar Fairgrounds’ Activity Center through mid-April.
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” opens Jan. 30 at the Del Mar Fairgrounds’ Activity Center. (The Art of Banksy)
The extensive exhibit includes more than 200 artworks, installations and films. Most of the pieces in the show are authorized prints from Banksy’s Off the Wall merchandising business, but some are privately owned limited-edition signed prints and others are re-creations and video-mapping of his art, sculpture and immersive installations from around the world.
At a media preview on Thursday, exhibit producer Sorina Burlacu said great care went into the storytelling aspect of the exhibit, which fills the entire 20,000-square-foot activity center near the fairgrounds’ front gates. The goal of the show is to tell, using Bansky’s own words, what his art represents and how it has changed over the years.
Today, Banksy isn’t just one person. The name represents a collective of artists who are dedicated not only to bringing Banksy’s vision to life but also protecting his anonymity.
Burlacu said nobody knows where Banksy came up with his street name, but it may represent his animosity for Britain’s banking system, which he satirized in 2004 by printing $1 million in fake British pound notes with Princess Diana’s portrait in place of Queen Elizabeth.
“He was against the system, against the banks. He was playing Robin Hood,” Burlacu said.
Burlacu arranged the “Art of Banksy” exhibition as a series of rooms that chart the progression of Banksy’s career from his early street graffiti — like the famous “Girl with Balloon” in 2002 and “Love is in the Air” (a man throwing a bouquet of flowers rather than a Molotov cocktail) in 2003 — to his increasingly ambitious immersive exhibitions and artistic stunts.
There are sections dedicated to Banksy’s satirizing of British politics, American consumerism, classic art masterpieces, commentaries on war, gun culture, global warming and the COVID-19 pandemic, and a room dedicated to all the album covers he designed for music artists.
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” opens Jan. 30 at the Del Mar Fairgrounds’ Activity Center. (The Art of Banksy)
There are also artist re-creations of some of Banksy’s most famous large-scale installations, including the dystopian Disneyland-inspired “bemusement park” in Somerset, England, in 2015, the currently-closed Walled Off Hotel on the Palestinian side of Bethlehem in the West Bank, and a painting series of resilient Ukrainians stenciled on the shattered walls of buildings in Ukraine bombed by Russia in 2022.
Throughout the exhibition, Burlacu has placed stenciled images of rats, which Banksy has said represent himself as an artist in his earliest days, when he’d go out at night to quickly paint art with stencils and spray paint and then scurry away before he got arrested. The rats also represent his mission of speaking up for the hungry and oppressed, including immigrants, refugees and child laborers.
Among the people invited to the preview on Thursday was San Diego grassroots artist Parker Edison, who is also a musician, audio documentarian, lecturer and community organizer. Edison said he was impressed by the breadth of the exhibit and the many social topics the artwork addressed.
“I’m impressed with the duality of everything,” Edison said. “That he can do so much and remain anonymous makes me think about how any one of us can do anything, starting at the street level.”
“The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” opens Jan. 30 and runs through April 19 at the Del Mar Fairgrounds Activity Center, 2260 Jimmy Durante Blvd. Tickets are sold by timed entry from noon to 8 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays. Tickets start at $28 at artofbanksyus.com/san-diego.
One of the exhibition rooms in “The Art of Banksy: Without Limits” exhibition, which opens Friday, Jan. 30, at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. (Anthony Ginnetti/@echoandemberproductions)