Gallery manager breaks silence after Banksy’s ‘Girl with balloon’ was ‘STOLEN in late-night raid’ as two men charged

BANKSY first got noticed for spray-painting trains and walls in his home city of Bristol during the early 1990s.

Street art and graffiti can be considered criminal damage so it's thought the artist stayed anonymous to avoid a run-in with the law.

In the beginning, his pieces were mainly created in Bristol, but in the 2000s his artworks started appearing all over the UK and other parts of the world.

Banksy chose to use stencils to create his pieces, probably because it's a faster way to paint.

He was influenced in his early days by a French graffiti artist called Blek le Rat.

Blek le Rat is considered to be the father of stencil graffiti and people sometimes confuse the work of the two artists.

Banksy doesn't only do street art - he has produced drawings, paintings and installation pieces.

The anonymous artist no longer sells photographs or reproductions of his street graffiti.

But his public "installations" are regularly resold, often even by removing the wall they were painted on.

He has also created his own theme park called Dismaland.

Banksy has left his memorable mark all over the world but has been most prolific in the UK.

The guerrilla artist is known to have created more than 120 works spanning three decades.

• In 2002, There is Always Hope - possibly the artist's most famous work - appeared on the South Bank in London.
• Devolved Parliament, Banksy's 13ft wide painting of chimpanzees in the House of Commons, hit the headlines in October 2019 when it sold at auction for £9.9million.
• GCHQ Government Spies Telephone Box was created in April 2014. The piece in Cheltenham shows three men wearing sunglasses and using listening devices to snoop on a phone box.
• In May 2020, Banksy unveiled new artwork Game Changer, which was painted on the wall of a ward at Southampton General Hospital in Hampshire.
• On July 14, 2020, Banksy returned to the London Underground with a work encouraging people to wear face masks. The work, called If You Don't Mask, You Don't Get, features a number of rats in pandemic-inspired poses, wearing face masks - but it was scrubbed off by cleaners.
• In October 2020, a Banksy mural appeared on the side of a building in Rothesay Avenue in Nottingham. The artwork shows a girl hula-hooping with a bicycle tyre. The mural has now been removed and sold to an Essex art gallery, disappointing local people who had hoped it would stay in the city.
• In December 2020, a Covid-inspired Banksy mural of a woman sneezing out her dentures on the side of a semi-detached home popped up on the side of a house in Bristol.
• In March 2020, Banksy confirmed an image showing a prisoner escaping from a former Reading Prison with a typewriter at the bottom of a "rope" made out of sheets of paper knotted together, was one of his works.
• In November 2022, Banksy has made his mark in Ukraine after unveiling a painting of a gymnast on the side of a tower block bombed by Russia.
• In February 2023, a new Banksy piece was confirmed after artwork showing a bruised woman pushing a man into a freezer appeared on the side of a building in Margate, Kent. The image depicted a 1950s housewife in an apron and washing-up gloves. a closer look revealed the woman had a swollen eye and a missing tooth. The artwork also incorporated a freezer - believed to have been placed up against the wall purposely -  and a man's legs sticking out as she closes the lid on him.
• In December 2023, a new Banksy artwork was removed from a south London street less than an hour after it was confirmed to be a genuine installation. The artist confirmed the artwork - a traffic stop sign covered with three aircraft said to resemble military drones - was his in a social media post shortly after midday.
• In March 2024, a new Banksy tree mural was sprayed on the side of a home in London. However, two days later images showed two streaks of white paint covering the green artwork.