Banksy Museum Barcelona

Banksy first appeared on the walls of Bristol before spreading to Brighton, London, and eventually everywhere. His identity remains unknown to this day, deliberately so. The anonymity is not a gimmick. It is part of the work itself. An artist who refuses to be owned, categorised, or pinned down by the system he has spent his career criticising.

Banksy is arguably the most talked-about artist of the last thirty years, and the Banksy Museum in Barcelona is one of the better ways to spend an afternoon in the city. The permanent exhibition in El Born brings together a serious body of his work in one place — and it lands differently than stumbling across a single piece on a wall somewhere.

And he does criticise it. Institutions, consumerism, war, political hypocrisy, the absurdity of modern life. Nothing is off limits and nothing is particularly subtle. His work is funny and uncomfortable, sometimes in the same image. That tension is what makes it stay with you.

What makes the Barcelona exhibition worth your time is that you get to see the full arc of what he has been saying and how he has been saying it. Plan for around an hour, maybe a little more if you find yourself stopping to read into the ideas behind specific pieces. It is not a large space but it rewards attention.

In 2018 at a Sotheby's auction in London, one of his most recognised works, Girl with Balloon, sold for just over a million pounds. Seconds after the hammer came down, the painting began shredding itself through a mechanism Banksy had secretly built into the frame years earlier. The room was stunned. It made global headlines overnight.

The part that would have made him smile: the partially shredded work, renamed Love is in the Bin, was subsequently valued at significantly more than it had sold for intact. His protest against the commercialisation of art immediately became one of the most commercially valuable things he had ever made.