Police in Spain announced the dismantling of an art counterfeiting network suspected of selling works attributed to the British street artist Banksy, with the price of some pieces reaching 1,500 euros or more.
Police in Catalonia said on Thursday that they had raided a workshop inside an apartment in the city of Zaragoza that was used by counterfeiters to counterfeit works of art before selling them in auction halls, antique stores, or via online platforms.
Fake works of art attributed to the artist Banksy were found in workshops in Spain (Reuters)
The police explained in a statement that investigators confiscated 9 businesses and recorded at least 25 sales to victims in Spain, Germany, Switzerland, the United States and Scotland. Four people are under investigation for fraud and intellectual property infringement crimes.
According to the police, it was made by “two young followers of Banksy’s street art who were in financial trouble”; Works of art similar to Banksy’s, by printing the drawings with ink and ink stamps in the Zaragoza workshop, and initially selling them for prices not exceeding 80 euros.
But a distributor collaborated with a distribution body to create fake certificates attributing the works to Banksy, the street artist whose identity has not previously been revealed.
Best Control, the only body that certifies Banksy’s works, discovered that the artworks and certificates were fake.
The police said: “The investigation is still open and it does not rule out the presence of more victims and new arrests.”
Graffiti against capitalism, dictatorship and wars
The international graffiti artist “Banksy” describes himself as a challenger of authority, and is known for his protest drawings and his harsh criticism of wars, dictatorial regimes, and capitalism in all its forms. He began painting with his murals supporting the uprising of the indigenous people of Mexico in 1994. Within 5 years, not a wall in the city of Bristol was devoid of one of his works. .
He developed his satirical iconography to convey his anti-authoritarian message, and raised many questions about his person and ideas, when he painted an image of the Mona Lisa carrying a bomb, painted on the bodies of real pigs, and released 200 live mice at an exhibition in London in 2005.
This was the year in which he executed his distinguished works on the walls of major museums in New York and London, and his drawings invaded Australia, America, Canada and Mexico, all the way to the separation wall between Israel and the West Bank in Palestine. He became one of the most famous graffiti artists, and his works are sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The right opportunity
Bansky cared a lot about refugees, and was keen to portray them as human beings and not just victims. On the third anniversary of the Syrian war, Bansky painted one of his most famous paintings, “Girl with a Red Balloon.”
On the walls opposite the French Embassy in London, he painted a mural of a girl in the play “Cosette” from the play Les Misérables crying, affected by a tear gas canister, criticizing the French authorities’ treatment of refugees in the Calais camp in the north of the country. In the Calais camp itself, he painted a picture of “Steve Jobs” as the son of a Syrian immigrant.
Bansky also visited Gaza in the wake of the 2014 war, insisted on entering it through tunnels, painted his works on the walls and doors of demolished homes, and published a short film drawing the world’s attention to the fact that Operation Protective Edge destroyed 18,000 homes.
In 2017, he opened the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, which he built next to the wall separating Israel from the Palestinian territories, and contained rooms decorated with his original works.
In 2018, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York witnessed a screening of the documentary film “The Man Who Stole Banksy” by Italian director Marco Proserpio, who stated, “Most of the things I saw about the Palestinians portrayed them as if they were not human, but Banksy’s art was the right opportunity to portray them as human beings.”
