A man who has long been accused of being Banksy has set the record straight after the latest news on the graffiti artist dropped.
Although the likes of Daft Punk and Sia have found fame in the world of music by keeping their faces hidden, Banksy has somehow managed to keep his identity under wraps for nearly 30 years, despite now being one of the most renowned artists on the planet.
Since first emerging in Bristol in the 90s, Banksy has gone on to share his art all over the world, selling works to the likes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
He’s also pulled off some pretty famous stunts, whether it be shredding a painting immediately after it was bought or recently leaving graffiti art on the side of a court building.
Banksy only ever gives us a glimpse (Instagram/@banksy)
Naturally, whenever there is any sort of mystery involved in life, there will always be people who go out of their way to try and solve it, despite it undoubtedly taking away some of the magic.
Recent investigations by Reuters have seemingly confirmed what many have suspected for years now, that Banksy’s real name is Robin Gunningham.
But there have been plenty of mistaken identities over the years as people try and work out who the man behind the mask is, with some suggesting that it was Robert Del Naja, a member of the Massive Attack band, a British trip-hop group formed in Bristol, while others even joked that it could be Art Attack’s Neil Buchanan.
Another man linked with the artist is George Georgiou, with the Londoner simply making the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time after he was spotted by a Banksy mural near Finsbury Park in 2024.
He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (SWNS)
There’s also certainly a likeness with him and one of the first known picture of Banksy, which shows the artist in Jamaica in the late 2000s, but now he’s made it clear that he wants people to stop sharing the photos of him.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, the 69-year-old said: “I’m not Banksy… It’s really annoying, it’s ridiculous and it’s disturbing. The first day, it was a laugh. It’s a bit of an old joke now.”
Georgiou said he was only next to the mural because it was painted on the building owned by his sons, with the Islington-based father suggesting that he dislikes painting and instead focuses on his role as a semi-retired builder.
He added: “When it first happened, there was less reaction than there is now.
The piece popped up in North London 2024 (Getty Images/Richard Baker/Contributor)
“It ain’t really anything that I’m worried about. It’s just really annoying because I’m still working. It’s just disrupting my day endlessly.
“It’s just the day-to-day, every five minutes you pick up the bloody phone and it’s just someone having a giggle.
“That’s all it is. It’s all harmless stuff, but when you’re trying to get on with your life, it’s just really annoying. It’s just a pain in the butt.”
The only benefit really for Georgiou is that people are suggesting he looks far younger than he actually is, but he suggested that he wished he actually was Banksy, because then ‘no one would know who the f*** I am’.
When did Banksy start?1990s
(Andrew Michael/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The elusive artist’s work started popping up around parts of his hometown of Bristol in the early 90s.
One of his earliest pieces in the city was some graffiti, mocking Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Russian Communist Party. He used a stencil of the late dictator, complete with a punk mohawk and hoop earring.
And perhaps one of his first, well-known murals was ‘Mild Mild West’, which depicted a teddy bear throwing a molotov cocktail at policemen dressed in riot gear.
2000s
Banksy confirmed that he was responsible for the stunt (Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
During the early 2000s, Banksy’s famous stencils of monkeys and rats began to appear across London and some other parts of the country.
‘Laugh Now’ emerged in 2002 after the artist was commissioned by Brighton’s Ocean Rooms nightclub. It depicts a chimp wearing a sandwich board that reads: “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.”
That same year, Banksy released his most famous graffiti art to date – ‘Girl with Balloon’. It first appeared on London’s Waterloo Bridge, with more stencils later cropping up around the capital.
After a framed version sold for more than £1 million at an auction in 2018, the piece self-destructed and shredded itself.
Banksy continued to rise to prominence in the 2000s, with notable pieces including: ‘Kissing Coppers’, ‘Grim Reaper’, ‘Flower Thrower’, and ‘One Nation Under CCTV’.
2010s and onwards
Banksy graffitied on the wreckage of damaged buildings caused by Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia (Roman Pilipey/Getty Images)
In the 2010s, Banksy started to move his artwork even further afield.
In 2015, he opened Dismaland, a temporary ‘bemusement park’ in Weston Super Mare, which offered a dystopian twist on the joy often associated with places like Disneyland.
He went on to create a mural called ‘Season’s Greetings’ in Wales in 2018. This depicted the contents of a large bin being burned while a child stuck their tongue out to eat the ashes – mistaking them for snowflakes.
The next year, the artist did another festive piece in Birmingham, graffitiing two reindeer painted to look like they were pulling a bench on which homeless people were known to sleep.
In 2022, Banksy’s work started to show up in Ukraine. He painted a series of seven anti-war street art murals across the country, many of which were in Kyiv.