New Banksy video highlights warmth of generous passers-by in Birmingham
9 December 2019, 16:24
Banksy has posted a video of a new artwork on his Instagram in which he raises awareness of homelessness in Birmingham ahead of Christmas.
The guerrilla graffiti artist uploaded the clip on Monday depicting a homeless man called Ryan going to sleep on a bench.
The camera then pans to show two reindeer on a brick wall in the artist’s distinctive style.
In the caption, the artist, whose identity is unknown, wrote: “God bless Birmingham.
“In the 20 minutes we filmed Ryan on this bench passers-by gave him a hot drink, two chocolate bars and a lighter - without him ever asking for anything.”
Banksy has long used his artwork to make political statements.
His piece Devolved Parliament, which depicted MPs in the House of Commons as chimpanzees, was sold for almost £10 million in October.
In the same month, he opened his own homeware store in south London following a legal dispute with a greetings card company.
The new store, called Gross Domestic Product, opened on October 1 in the windows of a former Croydon carpet shop.
Banksy says he was forced to open the shop, which will sell "impractical and offensive merchandise", after he got into a legal dispute with a greeting cards company.
The anonymous artist is believed to have begun his career as a graffiti artist in the early 1990s in the Bristol underground scene.
In the late ’90s, he began predominantly began using stencils, making his work more widely recognisable around Bristol and in London, as his signature style developed.
His satirical street art and subversive epigrams are famous for combining dark humour with graffiti.
