Banksy’s career as a graffiti artists started in the late 1990s as a part of DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ) art group with two other members. He was a freehand artist for quite a while but over time his drawings became large and he turned to stencilling as according to his own words it became more difficult for him to finish his artworks and escape from the police. Banksy’s first known large mural was The Mild Mild West painted in 1997. It was on a wall of a former solicitors’ office covering an advertisement in Stokes Croft in Bristol. It has a teddy bear on it throwing a Molotov cocktail at three riot policemen.

Banksy had his first solo show Existentialism, “An Exhibition of Art, Lies and Deviousness” at 33 1/3 Gallery in Los Angeles in 2002. In 2003 he had a Turf War exhibition of artworks painted on animals in a London warehouse. A number of his subversive paintings were shown in a Westbourne Grove space in London in 2005. “Banksy UK Summer Show” was held at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery in 2009. In 2013 Banksy had his Better Out Than In residency and a one-month show on the streets of New York. A pop-up stall ( potentially costing US$31,000) manned by an elderly man was set up on Fifth Avenue near Central Park and 25 canvases US$60 each were offered to the public. Two of them were later sold at auction for US$214,000 in 2014.

Banksy sponsored the establishment of the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem to mark the 100th anniversary of the British control of Palestine in 2017 which is open to the public and has Banksy’s artwork and a contemporary art gallery.

Banksy returned to New York to make more murals in 2018 some of which were destroyed but the others in Brooklyn are still there. The very same year his Baloon Girl was sold for just over one million pounds sterling at Sotheby’s in London. His other painting Devolved Parliament was sold at the same venue for almost ten million pounds sterling in October 2019.