Banksy: Carrying Love into a Half-Destroyed World

His black-and-white stencils are beautiful, witty, and provocative: police officers with smiley faces, rats, monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, little girls hugging rockets, policemen on a walk, Samuel Jackson and John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction," shooting bananas instead of guns. All of this is pun and irony, statements and incitements, and each of these works contains a lot of political and social contexts. Can they be fully understood without realizing who stands behind the persona of Banksy? This book by Japanese art researcher Yuki Yoshiara attempts to look into the artist's past, introduces us to the environment in which he grew up, and helps us get closer to the true meaning of his messages. Banksy is, above all, a free and radical artist, and therefore the layout of the book is variable and flexible, unpredictable, yet not losing elegance. Welcome to the world of one of the most controversial artists of the 21st century! His black-and-white stencils are beautiful, witty, and provocative: police officers with smiley faces, rats, monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, little girls hugging rockets, policemen on a walk, Samuel Jackson and John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction," shooting bananas instead of guns. All of this is pun and irony, statements and incitements, and each of these works contains a lot of political and social contexts. Can they be fully understood without realizing who stands behind the persona of Banksy? This book by Japanese art researcher Yuki Yoshiara attempts to look into the artist's past, introduces us to the environment in which he grew up, and helps us get closer to the true meaning of his messages. Banksy is, above all, a free and radical artist, and therefore the layout of the book is variable and flexible, unpredictable, yet not losing elegance. Welcome to the world of one of the most controversial artists of the 21st century!