Horenka resident Tetiana Reznychenko saw the three men and said she made coffee for the painters. REUTERS/Illustration/Catherine Tai. Source photos: REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

HORENKA, Ukraine

In late 2022, an ambulance pulled up to a bombed-out apartment building in this village outside Kyiv. Three people emerged. One wore a gray hoodie, another a baseball cap. Both had masks covering their faces.

The third was more easily identifiable: He was unmasked, and had one arm and two prosthetic legs, witnesses told Reuters.

The masked men carried cardboard stencils from the ambulance and taped them to what had been an interior wall of an apartment before the Russians obliterated the place. Then they pulled out cans of spray paint and got to work. An absurd image appeared in minutes: a bearded man in a bathtub, scrubbing his back amid the wreckage.

Its creator was Banksy, one of the world’s most popular and enigmatic artists, whose identity has been debated and closely guarded for decades. Banksy is best known for simple yet sophisticated stencil paintings with searing social commentary. His work has generated tens of millions of dollars in sales over the years.

Once an annoyance to authorities who viewed him as a vandal, he has become a British national treasure. In one survey, Brits rated him more popular than Rembrandt and Monet. In another poll, his “Girl with Balloon” painting was voted the favorite piece of artwork Britain has produced.

Some critics believe Banksy’s anonymity is as important to his work as stencils and paint. The British press has run many articles over the years that tried to deduce his identity. Still, Banksy and his inner circle won’t talk about it. Some have signed non-disclosure agreements. Others keep quiet out of loyalty, or fear of crossing the artist, his fans and his influential company, Pest Control Office, which authenticates his work and decides who gets the first chance to buy Banksy’s latest pieces.

When the bathtub mural and other Banksy pieces began appearing in Ukraine, Reuters wondered about the artist and how he had pulled off the stunt. Horenka was less than five miles east of Bucha, where Russian forces had left behind at least 300 civilians dead seven months earlier.

Banksy’s work in Ukraine

So we set out to determine how Banksy did it – and who he really is. Weeks later, a reporter visited Horenka with a photo lineup of graffiti artists often rumored to be the artist and showed the pictures to locals to see if anyone recognized him. Not long after, we heard that a famous British musician – one of the people often whispered to be Banksy – had been spotted in Kyiv, giving us a theory to pursue.

Reuters interviewed a dozen Banksy-world insiders and experts. None would comment on his identity, but many filled in details about his life and career. We examined photos of the artist, most of which obscured his face but contained critical information. We later unearthed previously undisclosed U.S. court records and police reports.

These included a hand-written confession by the artist to a long-ago misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct – a document that revealed, beyond dispute, Banksy’s true identity.

And in the process, we learned how and why the man behind the name Banksy vanished from the public record more than a decade ago.

Reuters presented that man with its findings about his identity and detailed questions about his work and career. He didn’t reply. Banksy’s company, Pest Control, said the artist “has decided to say nothing.”

His long-time lawyer, Mark Stephens, wrote to Reuters that Banksy “does not accept that many of the details contained within your enquiry are correct.” He didn’t elaborate. Without confirming or denying Banksy’s identity, Stephens urged us not to publish this report, saying doing so would violate the artist’s privacy, interfere with his art and put him in danger.

For years, Stephens wrote, Banksy has “been subjected to fixated, threatening and extremist behaviour.” (He declined to describe those threats.) Unmasking Banksy would harm the public, too, Stephens wrote.

Working “anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests,” he wrote. “It protects freedom of expression by allowing creators to speak truth to power without fear of retaliation, censorship or persecution – particularly when addressing sensitive issues such as politics, religion or social justice.”

Reuters took into account Banksy’s privacy claims – and the fact that many of his fans wish for him to remain anonymous. Yet we concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse. In so doing, we applied the same principle Reuters uses everywhere. The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity – a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work – has enabled him to operate without such transparency.

As for the risk he might face of retaliation or censorship, Britain’s legal and political establishments seem comfortable with Banksy’s messages and how he delivers them.

On September 7, for example, he stenciled a provocative piece on the exterior wall of London’s Royal Courts of Justice, a historically protected building. It depicted a judge in wig and robes bashing an unarmed protester with a gavel. Two months earlier, the government had designated the pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. The day before the painting appeared, about 900 people were arrested at protests against the ban.

Stephens didn’t reply to a question about whether the mural was tied to that crackdown. In any event, Banksy’s painted protest against British justice appears to have gotten a pass so far.

Under local laws, graffiti is a crime, with penalties ranging from fines and community service to (rarely) jail time. The day after the mural went up, London’s Metropolitan Police said it was investigating “a report of criminal damage” to the building. An investigation remains under way, the Ministry of Justice said. The mural was power-washed off the wall, leaving behind a shadow of the image. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the ministry said that as of December, the government had spent £23,690 removing the piece. The work continues, it said: Next, specialist contractors will use laser equipment on the stain.

The justice ministry declined to say whether Banksy was penalized or paid compensation. Stephens had no comment.

Some artists have questioned if Banksy, once considered anti-establishment, now enjoys special treatment from Britain’s powers that be. In 2014, Vice Media asked: “Why Is Banksy the Only Person Allowed to Vandalize Britain’s Walls?” The story quoted David Speed, a street artist who ran a British graffiti collective. “It’s very much one rule for him and another rule for everyone else,” Speed told Vice. “When street artists do it, it’s vandalism. When Banksy does it, it’s an art piece.”

“I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.”

BANKSY

Time Out London, 2010

Contacted by Reuters, Speed praised Banksy as “a really important artist of modern times.” Yet he still wonders why “one artist should be able to have carte blanche and everyone else would be subject to penalties.”

“Is he above the law?” Speed said. “The evidence would suggest that he is.”

Some experts believe Banksy’s ability to use the world as his canvas is money in the bank. One analyst, MyArtBroker, observed that the Royal Courts of Justice mural helped bolster Banksy’s market value.

Although such public pieces “cannot be monetised directly, they maintain visibility and authorship – qualities that keep collector confidence high and demand active,” art investment site MyArtBroker wrote in a report on the 2025 market for Banksy’s work. Banksy’s “street interventions,” it said, help prop up demand and prices for his art as a whole. One Banksy piece was sold by Sotheby’s for £4.2 million ($5.7 million) last year, the report noted.

Banksy lawyer Stephens didn’t answer questions about whether Banksy has been penalized for his exploits. But he noted that some owners are happy when he paints on their buildings. “It appears that if people find a Banksy added to their wall, most of them call Sotheby’s rather than the police,” he wrote. “The question of where the artist’s work sits in the legal landscape is an interesting one, and I’m as bemused as anyone else.”

This is the story of the art, commerce and paradox of Banksy, arguably the most famous anonymous man in the world. The journey to understand him began in Ukraine and took us to a billboard in New York’s Meatpacking District, and the walls and auction houses of London.

THE
PHOTO
LINEUP

For a quarter of a century, Banksy has created the impression that he can be anywhere, at any time, and go unnoticed. Searching for clues to his identity feels “like a treasure hunt,” said Ulrich Blanche, an art historian and Banksy expert.

After the Ukraine murals appeared, Banksy posted a video on his Instagram confirming the pieces were his. The footage also showed a painter wearing a gray hoodie in Horenka. It was filmed from behind the man, hiding his face. We went back to the village in hopes that locals had a better view.

Among the possible Banksys in the Reuters photo lineup was Thierry Guetta, a street artist who goes by Mr Brainwash. Guetta was featured in Banksy’s Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary, “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” Guetta is French; Banksy has said he’s from Bristol, England. Given Guetta’s nationality and his role in the film, he seemed a longshot candidate. Still, the idea that Banksy would covertly feature himself on screen might fit with his reputation as a prankster who hides in plain sight.

Another candidate, perhaps the prime one, was Robin Gunningham. The Bristol native had been “unmasked” as Banksy in 2008 by The Mail on Sunday. The British tabloid said its year-long investigation had “come as close as anyone possibly can to revealing” Banksy’s identity. But it hedged a bit. Its cover featured a photo of a man “believed to be Banksy.” When the photo first surfaced years before the 2008 story, the artist’s manager denied it depicted Banksy.

A third artist in the lineup was also from Bristol: Robert Del Naja, frontman of trip-hop band Massive Attack. A graffiti pioneer known as 3D, Del Naja hosted a 2013 exhibition of art he produced for Massive Attack. It was held at the London gallery of Banksy’s former manager, Steve Lazarides. In 2016, a Scottish writer had found that several Banksy street pieces appeared at the same locations and around the same time Massive Attack had just performed.

Horenka resident Tetiana Reznychenko told us she made coffee for the two men who did the bathtub mural and saw the two painters without their masks. As we swiped through the lineup on a cellphone, Reznychenko shook her head no. Then, when shown one of the photos, her eyes widened, even as she denied having seen the man in the picture.

That man was Robert Del Naja.

The reaction proved nothing. But it made sense given some other information we later discovered.

We also learned that the two men who painted the wall were escorted there by Giles Duley, the man with one arm and two prosthetic legs. Duley, a documentary photographer, lost his limbs in Afghanistan in 2011. His Legacy of War Foundation donates ambulances to local NGOs in Ukraine. After painting the Ukraine murals, Banksy publicly thanked Duley for lending him an ambulance to travel in the region.

Duley had an interesting link to one candidate. His photography has served as backdrop visuals at concerts of Massive Attack, Del Naja’s band.

Not long after the Reznychenko interview, we got another tantalizing lead. A source had stopped by the Kyiv Hilton during Banksy’s time in Ukraine.

“You’ll never fucking guess who I met,” the source said. “Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack!”

We later learned from people familiar with Ukrainian immigration procedures that Duley and Del Naja had indeed entered Ukraine. They crossed the border with Poland on October 28, 2022 – shortly before the Banksy murals began to appear.

But there was no evidence that Gunningham, Guetta or any other rumored Banksy traveled to Ukraine in that period.

That left a puzzle: Besides Del Naja, who was the other painter Duley took to Horenka? Del Naja didn’t reply to questions sent via his band’s manager. Duley, reached by email, said: “I’d leave that to Banksy’s team.”

​​

THE
ALLURE OF 
ANONYMITY

Some critics believe Banksy’s ability to paint at lightning speed in public and evade detection is “a big part of his work, or his most important work,” said scholar Blanche. “This anonymity is a statement in itself.”

His mastery of disguise began as a way of shaking the police, says former manager Lazarides. In an interview, Lazarides said anonymity served a practical purpose in Bristol, where authorities enforced “draconian” policies against graffiti. “Banksy’s anonymity, to start with, was exactly that: It was to evade law authorities,” he said.

Anonymity became integral to the brand. In 2010, when TIME magazine named him one of the world’s most influential people, Banksy appeared in a photo portrait wearing a bag over his head.

Despite such influence and popularity, most of the world’s top museums don’t display his work. Those contacted by Reuters politely declined to explain why. One of them, Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, owns a photo portrait of Banksy in a hooded coat and a chimpanzee mask. A gallery spokesperson said the portrait is in its collection because “the artist himself is a British figure of cultural and social significance.” It isn’t currently on display.

“I'm not so interested in convincing people in the art world that what I do is 'art.' I'm more bothered about convincing people in the graffiti community that what I do is really vandalism.”

BANKSY

LA Weekly, 2010

Banksy has evolved as an artist, from painting street pieces to making an Oscar-nominated movie to creating a hotel on the West Bank and a satirical theme park called Dismaland. He was quick to use the Internet and other digital tools to spread his work. Early on, he registered a website where his team posted online images of his street art. Images that got the most clicks were mass-produced and sold as screen prints.

How much would the revelation of Banksy’s identity affect the value of his work? Reuters contacted more than a dozen major galleries, museums and auction houses. Most declined to comment on Banksy. Views differ among those who spoke.

One of the largest Banksy dealers, Acoris Andipa, said his clients are enticed by the art, “not because he’s masked, not because he’s a Robin Hood-character.”

Banksy: 2003-2009

Gallery owner and dealer Robert Casterline sees a potential drop in the market value of Banksy’s work. “It depends how he spins it,” Casterline said of the way Banksy responds to being named. “And it depends on what he creates next and whether someone wants to hang it on their wall.”

Banksy is “not doing anything mind-shattering. Half of his paintings are sprayed stencils.” Even so, Banksy has “created something amazing,” Casterline said. “He formulated a recipe that the media became enamored with. He created that mystique.”

“I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.”

BANKSY

Time Out NY, 2010

That mystique has been monetized. In 2024, former manager Lazarides auctioned off art and personal artifacts, including 15 burner phones once used “for contacting Banksy.” The phone collection fetched $15,875.

Reuters examined what Banksy and people close to him have divulged about his identity. Much pointed to Del Naja and reinforced our theory that Banksy was Del Naja, who immigration sources told us was in Ukraine when the murals appeared.

In past media interviews, Banksy talked about his hometown of Bristol in southwest England, known for its street-art and music scenes. Bristol is where Del Naja began to paint as the street artist 3D. Some credit him with bringing stencil graffiti – Banksy’s trademark medium – to Britain.

Banksy: 2010-2020

In a 2014 interview with Very Nearly Almost magazine, Del Naja said he grew interested in the form because of stencils distributed with records by anarchist punk bands. One band in particular links Del Naja to Banksy. “I remember getting records from Crass,” Del Naja said.

Crass published its own fanzines. One gave detailed instructions for fans to make their own stencils. Decades later, Banksy offered similar instructions in his own publications. Crass printed its work under its own imprint, “Exitstencil Press.” One of Banksy’s self-published fanzines was similarly titled “Existencilism.” A Crass poster is featured in a diorama of Banksy’s boyhood bedroom that the artist created for his Cut & Run exhibition in 2023.

“I think there’s space for art to be loud, crass and obvious. If it looks like the rantings of an angry adolescent what’s wrong with that? What was wrong with punk?”

BANKSY

Dismaland website, 2015

Like Banksy, Crass has denounced fascism and authoritarianism and advocated pacifism, feminism and environmentalism. The anarchy symbol eventually became common in Banksy’s work. Today he finances a ship that helps rescue migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s named the Louise Michel, after one of France’s most famous anarchists. His “Devolved Parliament,” showing Britain’s House of Commons filled with chimpanzees, exemplifies his skill at sticking it to authority.

Banksy: 2021-present

​​

A
CRUCIAL
CLUE

On Instagram in June 2018, Banksy posted a series of rats he stenciled in Paris and called the city the “birthplace of modern stencil art.” He was referring to the May 1968 protests, when students papered Paris with posters made with screen prints, a variety of stencil art.

Banksy isn’t the first street artist to use rats as a motif. In the 1980s, French artist Xavier Prou, who goes by Blek le Rat, used stencils to paint rodents around Paris.

“Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it, too, only Blek did it 20 years earlier,” Banksy said in a 2008 interview with Britain’s Daily Mail. That year, Blek said of Banksy: “People say he copies me, but I don’t think so. I’m the old man, he’s the new kid, and if I’m an inspiration to an artist that good, I love it.”

In an interview with Reuters, Blek expanded on that view. “Does an idea belong to those who use it or those who find it?” he asked. “I’ve decided to think that ideas belong to those who use them, thus to everyone.”

Banksy has acknowledged similarities between his work and Blek’s, but he has cited another painter as a stronger influence. In a 2012 post, the FAQ section of Banksy’s website addressed whether he copied Blek. Banksy answered: “No. I copied 3D from Massive Attack. He can actually draw.”

It was a reference to Del Naja, the artist who painted as 3D, who stated in 2014 that his inspirations included the punk band Crass, and whose early stencil work, though less refined, resembles later Banksy pieces.

Another possible clue came from a longtime Del Naja friend, music producer Goldie. In a 2017 podcast interview, Goldie referred to Banksy by his first name: “No disrespect to Rob,” Goldie said. “I think he is a brilliant artist. I think he has flipped the world of art over.” The comment fueled rumors that “Rob” was a reference to Del Naja.

As frontman for Massive Attack, Del Naja has used his fame to highlight political and social injustice, a theme of Banksy’s art and philanthropy. Protesting the Iraq War in 2003, Del Naja was photographed holding a placard high above his head. On it was Banksy’s image of a smiling grim reaper.

In an interview with CBS television first aired in 2023, former manager Lazarides toyed with viewers keen to solve the mystery. “I was on my computer and looked and I went Rob, Robin …,” he said. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That name’s out there and who says it’s true. Robin, Robert, Robbie.”

Lazarides continued: “Mr. Del Naja is a graffiti artist, and I would say arguably way better than Banksy.” Then: “Yes. It’s Robert Del Naja. And me, and a few other people,” he teased, breaking into laughter. Then: “Well maybe I’m being serious and maybe I’m not.”

In an interview with CBS television, Banksy’s former longtime manager, Steve Lazarides, toyed with viewers keen to learn Banksy’s true identity. Source: CBS Sunday Morning Facebook page

Hints like that were part of the reason we scoured “Banksy Captured,” Lazarides’ two-volume account of managing the artist from the late 1990s to 2008. The books are filled with behind-the-scenes photos. The shots of Banksy obscure his face, but the pictures and text are sprinkled with clues – including an anecdote from 25 years ago, when Banksy was arrested in New York.

​​

NEW YORK

In September 2000, gallerist Ivy Brown gave Steve Lazarides and Banksy an earful about her apartment building.

At the time, Brown represented Lazarides in his photography career. A billboard had been erected on the roof of 675 Hudson Street in Manhattan, an architecturally distinctive brownstone with a triangular footprint similar to that of New York’s famous Flatiron building.

In an interview, she told Reuters she was “having a meltdown.” September Fashion Week was under way in New York, and the billboard was an advertisement for Marc Jacobs clothing. The ad showed a young man’s head alongside the words, “Boys Love Marc Jacobs.”

“I felt it defaced the building,” Brown said.

She took her guests to the roof and hoped for help. “I was, like, ‘Look at that thing!’ You know, it’s like, ‘Yo B, love you to do something up there.”

Over the next three days, Banksy hung out at a bar across the street. Brown said she often noticed him gazing at the ad. Advertising billboards had long fascinated Banksy. They are, he once argued, akin to how some critics view graffiti: a public statement foisted on people without permission. “Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours,” he wrote in 2004. “It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use.”

In September 2000, Banksy was shifting from painting freehand to using stencils, a method suited for repetition and speed. But when he climbed up on Brown’s roof to have at the billboard, he painted freehand.

The half-finished image resembled a billboard Banksy saw in Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.” In his 2023 “Cut & Run” exhibition in Glasgow, the artist said the movie scene inspired him to get into graffiti. In “Jaws,” someone doctored a tourism billboard depicting a woman on an inflatable raft in the sea. The vandal added a shark fin and gave the woman bulging eyes and a speech bubble: “HELP!!! SHARK.”

In a painting spree, Lazarides wrote, Banksy “doctored the Marc Jacobs Men billboard so that the model had goofy teeth” and drew a “giant speech bubble” that was strangely empty.

That’s because New York police caught Banksy before he could finish.

In his book, Lazarides mentioned the arrest, though not when it happened or the building’s address. But by geolocating the building in the photos Lazarides published, and by dating the Marc Jacobs billboard to September 2000, when New York Fashion Week was underway, we were able to unearth police documents and a court file from the incident.

The contents of these records have never been reported.

They show that at 4:20 a.m. on September 18, 2000, authorities found a man defacing a billboard on the roof of 675 Hudson Street. Because damages exceeded $1,500, police sought to charge him with a felony. Among the documents is the man’s handwritten confession.

Within hours of his arrest, documents show, the man was assigned a public defender. That afternoon, he was released after agreeing to temporarily turn over his passport.

“He got out pretty fast, and he called me,” Brown recalled. “He was like, ‘Ello luvvie!’ I said ‘Yo, B! How did you get out so fast?’ And he said, ‘Female judge, nudge-nudge, wink-wink,’” Brown said.

“I realized that part of his art was getting out of jail.”

SIGNED
BY THE 
ARTIST

The court file shows he would later post $1,500 bail in exchange for his passport. The felony charges were reduced to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. He paid a fine and fees totaling $310, and by early 2001, he completed his sentence of five days of community service, the records show. On the bail form, he gave his address as 160 E. 25th Street in New York, the location of one of Manhattan’s most eccentric hotels.

Before his arrest, Banksy had lived for months at a time at the Carlton Arms Hotel, which over the years has let artists stay for free in return for decorating their rooms. Archived pages of the hotel website indicate that in 1997, Banksy painted a mural at the hotel. In 1999, the site shows, he finished an entire room, 5B.

The work looked nothing like the Banksys of today. It was painted freehand, in a rainbow of colors. The characters were cartoonish. The hotel site attributed the works to “Robin Banks” – a play on “robbing banks,” later shortened to Banksy.

Emma Houghton told Reuters she dated the artist for four years in the 1990s, “just before he was transitioning into Banksy.” In an interview, she wouldn't reveal his true identity or how they met. But she recounted that in written correspondence with her, the name he used for himself evolved: from his birth name to “Mr. Banks” and then “to Banksy.” In 2024, Houghton auctioned a number of these hand-painted and signed cards, which fetched £56,000.

Robert Clarke, a former Carlton Arms employee, struck up a friendship with Banksy and wrote in a memoir about their time together at the hotel. They bonded because both were from Bristol, Clarke wrote.

The book included a passage that would later strike us as important: Banksy, Clarke wrote, told him he was considering legally changing his name to “Robin Banks.” Reuters was unable to locate Clarke for comment.

When Banksy was busted in 2000, he wasn’t on the New York Police Department’s radar, said Steve Mona, the now-retired lieutenant who ran the 75-member vandal squad back then. The police had no idea they had nabbed “Banksy” because the artist had only recently begun employing the style and pseudonym that would make him famous.

Given Banksy’s celebrity, the name of the culprit now takes on significance. It wasn’t Del Naja who defaced the billboard atop 675 Hudson Street. The man who confessed was Robin Gunningham.

In addition to his signature, Gunningham is repeatedly named in court and police documents related to the arrest.

The Mail on Sunday had been right in 2008 in making the case that Gunningham was Banksy. In hindsight, Gunningham’s effort to hide his identity began falling apart with his September 2000 arrest in New York. Records of the bust existed and they contained his real name. The books by former manager Lazarides wouldn’t be published until 2019. But the photos and the details Lazarides included about the arrest enabled us to pinpoint where Banksy was apprehended and the ad he defaced.

But how did proving beyond question that Banksy was Robin Gunningham square with what we knew about the murals in Ukraine?

Sources told us there was no record that Gunningham ever entered Ukraine. So who was Del Naja’s painting partner if Gunningham hadn’t been there?

We recalled a detail from Banksy’s Carlton Arms days. As Clarke notes in “Seven Years with Banksy,” the artist had once considered legally changing his name.

LONDON

In the years after his New York arrest, Banksy became a phenomenon. His work seemed to be everywhere. No one seemed to know who he was, and many in the art world were dying to find out.

But in 2004, his anonymity act nearly collapsed after a run-in with a Jamaican photographer named Peter Dean Rickards.

Rickards was on assignment for the record label Wall of Sound. Banksy had signed with the label to produce artwork for album covers. He and Rickards met up in Kingston to work together. It didn’t go well.

“What we object to,” Rickards wrote on his website in a now-deleted post, “are people like Banksy who go around spewing pseudo-humanitarian bullshit to explain their ‘art’.” He wrote that Banksy “was just some wannabe-punk ‘stencilist’ with his head stuck incredibly far up his own redneck ass.”

Rickards didn’t reveal Banksy’s name. But he posted 21 photos of Banksy at work in Jamaica, 14 of which show his face from various angles. In July 2004, one of the photos was published by the Evening Standard. The headline: “Unmasked at last.”

But the Standard did not have Banksy’s given name. And there was at least some question whether the man in the photo was Banksy. Manager Lazarides issued a firm denial, telling the paper it was “someone else.”

Asked about that denial, Lazarides told Reuters he doesn’t believe he saw the photo before talking to the Standard.

Rickards died in 2014. It’s not clear what prompted his beef with Banksy, but his photos are unambiguous. We compared them to many more from Lazarides’ books and to footage from interviews that Banksy, using his pseudonym, gave in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The man in Rickards’ photos was Banksy.

Image comparisons show that Banksy often wore a bracelet and watch, always on his left arm. His hair was brown and bristly. He had glasses and an earring in his left ear. Rickards and Lazarides also captured in their photos a distinctive tattoo on Banksy’s left forearm.

In July 2008, The Mail on Sunday ran its Banksy investigation. Citing an anonymous source, the paper identified the man in the Rickards photo for the first time as Gunningham, an artist from Bristol who was born in 1973 and attended the Bristol Cathedral School.

Archived copies of the student magazine, The Cathedralian, contain numerous mentions of Gunningham. These include a comic strip he created around age 11.

Later, Gunningham earned school awards for his artwork and was lauded in the Cathedralian for his acting and athleticism. He “showed stage presence” in a school play and was commended for “spectacular saves” as a goalkeeper on the field hockey team.

A nimble artist with a theatrical streak: key traits of Banksy, the persona Gunningham would embrace.

Curiously, after the 2008 Mail on Sunday piece, the trail went cold. We found no trace of Gunningham in UK public records. He had seemingly gone off the grid.

But we now had a hypothesis about why there was no record of Gunningham visiting Ukraine. It was reinforced when we reached former manager Lazarides late last year. He told us we were pursuing a ghost.

“There is no Robin Gunningham,” Lazarides said when asked about the artist’s identity. “The name you’ve got I killed years ago,” he said of Robin Gunningham. Searching for him would be “a straight dead end.”

“Life-wise,” he said, “you’ll never find him.”

Anonymity started as a way to dodge the cops, Lazarides said. Eventually, keeping the secret became a burden. By the end of their partnership, Lazarides estimates he spent half or more of his time managing and maintaining the artist’s mystique.

“I think it became a good gag, and then, if you want my honest, honest opinion, I think it then became a disease,” he said.

In 2008, Lazarides said, he and Banksy made a “mutual” decision to part ways. In one of his last acts as Banksy’s manager, Lazarides said, he arranged a legal name change for his client. Robin Gunningham became someone else, under a name that could never be linked to him.

“I don’t remember whose idea it was, but I know for a fact it was me that set it all up,” Lazarides said. He declined to reveal the new name Gunningham took. “You make a pact and you keep your word,” he said.

A
SECRET
NO MORE

Lazarides did note that there was no hidden meaning, no pun, nothing special at all about the new identity Robin Gunningham took. “It’s just another name,” Lazarides told us.

That offhand comment was encouraging. It fit with another theory we had concerning the identity of the other painter with Del Naja in Ukraine.

We had compiled a rich public record of all things Banksy: his past statements, companies connected to him, and excerpts from books or articles about him at various stages of life.

By searching that data and cross-referencing it with other public records, we identified what we believed to be the name Banksy took. It is one of the most popular names in Britain, so common it helps him hide in plain sight.

“I have no interest in ever coming out. I figure there are enough self-opinionated assholes trying to get their ugly little faces in front of you as it is.”

BANKSY

Swindle magazine, 2006

Although those documents are public, Reuters isn’t identifying the specific ones used, in order to reduce the chances of revealing Banksy’s address and certain other private information. The documents include property records that establish a new name adopted by a relative, and records from a corporate filing – handled by Banksy’s former accountant – in which the only two shareholders listed were that relative and the new name assumed by the artist.

We had already placed Del Naja in Horenka, and witnesses described two men painting the Banksy mural there. Sources confirmed there was no evidence that Gunningham had entered Ukraine. But what about a man by the name we believed Banksy had taken?

That name is David Jones. It’s one of the most popular names among British men. In 2017, for example, there were about 6,000 men named David Jones in the UK, according to data analyzed by GBG, an identity-data intelligence company. David Jones also is the given name of David Bowie, whose Ziggy Stardust alter ego inspired a Banksy portrait of Queen Elizabeth.

On October 28, 2022, the day Duley and Del Naja entered Ukraine, a “David Jones” also crossed the border at the same location, according to a source familiar with immigration procedures. The source also told us the date of birth listed on Jones’ passport. It was the same as Robin Gunningham’s birthday.

According to the source, records also indicate Jones left Ukraine on November 2, 2022, the same day Del Naja departed.

Banksy, born Robin Gunningham, later took the name David Jones. (Whether he still uses that name is unclear.) And Robert Del Naja, Gunningham’s graffiti idol, friend, and a man himself rumored to be Banksy, has on at least one occasion been his secret painting partner.

Banksy wasn’t the Massive Attack frontman, whose 2024 climate action concert drew more than 30,000 fans to Bristol. But he has become a star performer in his own right. Case in point is the wild 2018 Sotheby’s auction in London of his iconic “Girl with Balloon.”

The painting had recently sold for $1.4 million. When it went up for resale that day, the art world was shocked to watch the piece get partially shredded by a device Banksy had secretly built into its frame. That piece, renamed “Love is in the Bin,” sold three years later for about $25 million.

Art dealer Casterline was at the auction and remembers when the shredder began to beep. He pulled out his phone to take pictures.

“Unfortunately, there was one person standing in front of me,” blocking the view, he said. It was an eccentric-looking man with a broad neck scarf and thick eyewear. Oddly, the man wasn’t watching the painting get shredded. He was looking in the other direction, observing the crowd's reaction.

Only later, reviewing what he shot, did Casterline notice that the man’s glasses appeared to have a small camera built into the bridge. (Banksy later posted a video of the stunt, including shots of the astonished audience.) Having seen Rickards’ 2004 photo of Robin Gunningham, Casterline is “pretty sure” it was the same man, thinner and older.

Casterline still has the photos. He is keeping them private, save for a tiny crop of the man’s glasses he shared with us. He echoed what many say in Banksy’s protective circle of friends, partners, collectors and critics.

“I don’t want to be the guy who exposes Banksy,” he said. ◼

“Nobody ever listened to me until they didn’t know who I was.”

BANKSY

Wall and Piece, 2005

The Banksy Economy

By James Pearson

The
Banksy
economy

Secret auctions, a network of companies and $250 million in secondary-market sales

The enigmatic street artist Banksy has built a multimillion-dollar business empire as opaque as his identity, operating through a network of British companies while largely staying outside the traditional art market, according to corporate filings and interviews with art market insiders.

The sale of Banksy pieces has generated an estimated $248.8 million in secondary market sales since 2015, according to data from art market research firm ArtTactic. The secondary market refers to the resale of artwork after its initial sale.

The artist himself receives only a small fraction from those sales, paid under a provision in UK law that entitles artists to royalties. But sources say Banksy now conducts private sales for VIP collectors that may generate millions of dollars directly, Reuters learned.

Reuters identified seven companies that have been directly connected to Banksy over the years, and at least two additional firms that were connected to the artist by name or via his lawyers and accountants. The centerpiece is the Pest Control Office, incorporated in 2008. It serves as both the artist's authentication body and business operation. Its parent company is Picturesonwalls Limited, which once operated a London gallery.

The financial growth has been substantial. Pest Control’s first financial report, published in 2009, showed total assets of £243,019. By 2015, that grew to £2.7 million, including £1.1 million in cash. The latest report, for 2024, reveals total net assets of about £5.7 million – comprising £4.4 million in cash and £1.2 million in “stocks.” The filings aren’t clear about whether these are shares or unsold artworks. The reports are published on Companies House, Britain’s corporate registry.

Picturesonwalls Limited’s latest report shows total net assets of £2.5 million, including £1 million in cash, up dramatically from just £63,013 in its first reporting period ending June 2005.

Early in his career, Banksy sold prints through the Pictures on Walls gallery for as little as £60, maintaining tight control over distribution. The gallery closed in 2017, posting a sardonic farewell noting that “disaster struck” when its artists became successful and prints became worth tens of thousands of pounds. Unable to reconcile becoming part of the art market it “once so self-righteously denounced,” the gallery explained in a post, it shut down.

Today, most Banksys changing hands are sold through private collectors, galleries, and auction houses, without apparent direct involvement or financial participation by the artist. “It’s very hard to buy a Banksy from Banksy,” explains art historian Ulrich Blanche.

Unless you’re one of a select group invited to one of the artist’s private sales. In February 2024, Banksy held a secret exhibition in a Shoreditch basement, according to a collector who obtained photos from attendees. The source shared some of the surreptitiously snapped photos with Reuters. They included shots of previously unseen original Banksy works. The event, held in a building on Hanbury Street, was open only to collectors invited directly by Pest Control.

Works offered included a print of a child sitting in a flowering tree that sold for £15,000, and a Madonna with Child painted on scrap metal with a rusty bullet hole that fetched £500,000. Buyers signed three-year non-resale agreements and nondisclosure agreements, the source told Reuters.

As the value of Banksy pieces has skyrocketed over the course of a quarter century, the artist’s authentication process has become increasingly important and, to some, controversial. Pest Control serves as the sole authenticator of Banksy pieces, but critics contend the process is slow and opaque.

The authentication process involves submitting pieces for examination, which may take months or even years. That frustrates those seeking to sell pieces quickly. But Jasper Tordoff, a Banksy expert at MyArtBroker, says the approach is “quite common” in the market, operating similarly to authentication processes for other street artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

“The whole reason they do this is to protect buyers,” Tordoff says, noting that “so many people have been conned into buying (fake) Banksys for legitimate Banksy money.”

Some buyers and dealers want greater transparency. Adam Coates acquired a Banksy print known as “Barcode” in 2004. Coates says that a former Banksy director and other experts have confirmed its authenticity. He first sought authentication from Pest Control in October 2010. But Pest Control has repeatedly refused, thus significantly limiting the print’s resale value.

Collector John Brandler, who specializes in reselling Banksy’s street pieces, faces similar frustrations. Although Banksy posts photos of his street works on Instagram, Pest Control refuses to authenticate them because the artist says they were created for those specific locations. Top auction houses won’t sell them either. Brandler considers the refusal to authenticate as bordering on “market manipulation.”

Tordoff disagrees. He maintains the authentication system protects rather than manipulates the market, particularly as prices escalate.

Neither Banksy, Pest Control nor Banksy’s lawyer, Mark Stephens – who is also a Pest Control director – would comment on the artist’s business and finances. Nor would they address specific authentication disputes.

Banksy

By Reuters staff

Philanthropy
and activism

Banksy has consistently used his art to fund charitable causes. As his fame has grown, so too have the sums he raises. Reuters could not confirm how much money the artist has donated. In his book “Banksy: The man behind the wall,” author Will Ellsworth-Jones notes that “there is no Banksy Foundation donating money publicly,” making it impossible to “give a complete picture of what he gives away.” Here are some of Banksy’s donations:

2002 Banksy collaborated with Greenpeace to produce artwork for  the environmental-action charity’s “Save or Delete” campaign  to highlight the dangers of deforestation: It showed characters from Disney’s animated film ‘The Jungle Book,’ tied up and blindfolded in a denuded patch of jungle.

2007 Banksy took his annual “Santa’s Ghetto” pop-up art show and 20 street artists to the West Bank city of Bethlehem, donating proceeds to local youth projects.

2008 Banksy released a series of 299 signed prints of his mural depicting children saluting a Tesco supermarket bag. The sale was conducted as a lottery. According to a published report, Banksy donated the £24,406.61 raised to Sightsavers, an international NGO that provides free eye operations.

2010 Banksy pledged to donate all royalties from 175 prints of his “Choose Your Weapon” mural of a hooded man holding a dog painted in the style of fellow street artist Keith Haring to Russian art collective Voina. Two members of the collective were in a St. Petersburg jail at the time for taking part in an anti-corruption protest.

That year, Banksy allowed Moorfields Eye Hospital in London to remove and auction the 2006 “Gangsta Rat” piece he painted on the side of its building. The piece was sold to raise money for the hospital.

2013 In a month-long residency in New York, Banksy bought a beat-up oil painting from a thrift store for $50 and altered the piece by adding a Nazi officer admiring the landscape it depicted. He then covertly returned the doctored work to the charity shop and included a note authenticating it as a Banksy. The charity, Housing Works, sold the piece at auction for $615,000.

2014 A struggling youth club in Bristol, the Broad Plain Boys Club, found a Banksy mural on its doorway. “Mobile Lovers” showed a couple embracing but distracted by their mobile phones. When it became clear it was a Banksy, the local council tried to claim it. Banksy clarified that he intended the piece as a gift to the club, which was facing closure. The club sold the piece for over £400,000 and used the money to stay afloat.

2015 Banksy enlisted dozens of artists to help create his theme park, “Dismaland.” After the park closed, he donated the set pieces and building materials used to create the alternative theme park to “The Jungle,” a camp for migrant refugees in Calais, northern France.

2017 Banksy opened “The Walled Off Hotel” in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. Banksy financed the project independently. The hotel has attracted thousands of visitors and its website notes that any profits will go to local projects.

2019 Banksy created a shop called “Gross Domestic Product” in London. The welcome mats he sold there were produced by women in Greek refugee camps using life vests that washed up on shore. Proceeds were donated to Love Welcomes, a group supporting refugees in the camps.

2020 At the peak of the first wave of COVID-19, Banksy unveiled a piece inside Southampton General Hospital that paid tribute to Britain’s National Health Service workers. It showed a boy who had discarded his Batman and Spiderman dolls in favor of a superhero nurse doll. Banksy donated it to the NHS. A year later, the piece fetched £16.8 million at auction, a Banksy record at that time. The proceeds were used to “support the wellbeing of NHS University Southampton Hospital staff and patients,” according to Christie’s.

That summer, Banksy also announced he had funded, equipped, and decorated a former French naval vessel to serve as a migrant rescue boat in the Mediterranean Sea. The ship was rechristened the MV Louise Michel, named after a 19th century French anarchist. According to a website for the boat, it has rescued hundreds of migrants. Conservatively, the vessel costs tens of thousands of dollars to operate each month.

2022 A few weeks after Banksy created seven pieces in Ukraine, the artist put a limited edition of 50 prints on sale, priced at £5,000 each. They were offered via the Legacy of War Foundation’s website. The sale raised £250,000 for the NGO.