In keeping with his works suddenly appearing in public spaces, the UK street artist Banksy announced just after midnight that his first official exhibition in 14 years will open this weekend in Glasgow, Scotland. The show at the Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) is titled Cut & Run: 25 Years Card Labour (18 June-28 August) and will span the artist’s career, beginning with his earliest works made in the late 1980s to recent pieces made this year.
Cut & Run will focus on the stencils the artist uses to create his works, which are often spray painted on walls around the world, including damaged buildings in Ukraine, a carpark in Los Angeles, the exterior of an old prison in Reading, the separating wall in Bethlehem and inside a London tube train. The exhibition will also feature the Union Flag stab vest that Banksy made for the pop star Stormzy and paintings such as Basquiat being stop and searched (2017), a version of which was painted on the walls outside a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at London’s Barbican Gallery in 2017.
Banksy says in a statement: “I’ve kept these stencils hidden away for years, mindful they could be used as evidence in a charge of criminal damage. But that moment seems to have passed, so now I’m exhibiting them in a gallery as works of art. I’m not sure which is the greater crime.”
One of the highlights of the show will be a model showing how Banksy embedded a shredder into the frame of one of his works that infamously self-destructed during an auction at Sotheby’s London in 2018. In addition, the “artist’s actual toilet” will be on display, according to the press release.
The elusive artist, whose identity is still widely unknown, announced the exhibition news on his Instagram page.
A specially made website has also been launched with more details of the exhibition. Tickets will cost between £15 for an adult (with £10 concessions for "student/OAP/low waged/tight fisted") and the show will be open through the night on weekends, closing at 5am before reopening again at 9am.
However, visitors hoping to visit after a night out who “show up appearing to be very intoxicated […] may be refused entry,” according to the website. Photography will be strictly prohibited with visitors having to put away their phones in a “lockable pouch for the duration” of the visit. But staff will be on hand taking complimentary polaroid photographs for those wanting a memento of the occasion.
Although there have been several Banksy exhibitions over the past decade, this will be the first officially sanctioned one since his solo show Banksy versus Bristol Museum in 2009. He says of the other shows: “While the unauthorised Banksy shows might look like sweepings from my studio floor, Cut & Run really is the actual sweepings from my studio floor.”
