Banksy makes eighth artwork in eight days: ‘Maximum Impact’

“I think it’s beautiful. I think it adds something very nice to the public space,” says street art expert Peter Ernst Coolen. “It was done with very little resources. He does this very wisely and I can see that he has had the greatest impact.”

Coolen responds to the appearance of the eighth Banksy artwork in London in eight days. The world’s most famous street art artist has stunned the Charlton area with a rhinoceros painted on a wall, which appears to be climbing an old Nissan Micra parked underneath it.

The other seven works of art he made in the previous days are also images of animals, such as the piranhas in a police shelter and the pelicans eating fish in front of a fish restaurant.

Here you can see the other seven works of art:

“That’s the great thing about street art, that art form, that an artist makes you look at your surroundings in a different way,” says Coolen.

Unlike many of the artist’s previous works, whose identity remains unclear, this series does not have a social or political message.

he is Walled Off Hotel with the worst sight in the world, for example, and the migrant boat that appeared at a pop festival in June.

Banksy’s boat surfed over the audience at Glastonbury:

“Banksy is mostly about seeing the right place and coming up with an idea,” says Coolen. “Think of turning a police booth into an aquarium. Or that cry wolf for a satellite dish. Great.”

Things ended badly with that wolf on that satellite dish. Less than an hour after Banksy published the work via Instagram, it became stolen. Last year the same thing happened with a road sign showing Banksy military drones have applied. “Yes, there is a market for that and it makes a lot of money,” says Coolen. “There are also reasonably professional parties that take that art off the street.”

There are several known cases of home or property owners who have sold a Banksy mural for hundreds of thousands. Coolen thinks that’s a shame. “He did something for the public space. It’s also specific to the place, you have to respect that.

According to Coolen, Banksy has greatly contributed to the acceptance of street art among the general public, including the Netherlands. The world’s largest Street Art Museum opened in 2020 on the site of the former NDSM shipyard in Amsterdam. This was established by Coolen in 2015.

But even before that, street art artists could visit established museums from time to time. “And yes, what you see now is that many museums are starting murals themselves, thus embracing this art form.” An example of this is the project Museum wallpapersinitiative of the Mauritshuis. Twenty street artists show what the museum has to offer elsewhere in the city.

Who Banksy is remains a mystery. Go there rumours that musician Robert Del Naja of British tour-hop group Massive Attack is behind it.