A mural that sprang up overnight on a residential building in North London is indeed a work by Banksy, who posted images confirming that he was its author via his Instagram.
The mural features a life-size image of a woman with a pressure washer. She is shown spraying bright green paint that forms a pattern that resembles leaves that would appear on a real tree before the wall.
Banksy uploaded photos of the mural to his popular Instagram page (12.3 million followers) on March 18.
James Peak, the super-fan behind the BBC Radio 4 podcast The Banksy Story, said the mural had all the “right techniques” of the artist’s work, with “an interesting and an easy-to-understand message” and a clever location. “If it isn’t Banksy, it’s an amazing copycat,” he told BBC Radio 4 Today.
Alex Georgiou works for the company that owns the building where the mural has been painted. After hearing about it on Sunday night, Georgiou saw it on Monday morning.
“It’s quite mad to be honest, to come down here and just to see all the crowds of people looking at the building,” he told the Guardian, noting it was currently unoccupied and listed on the rental market.
“The question is, what do I do with it now? What am I meant to do with it now? I definitely plan on keeping it on there and letting people enjoy it, everyone’s loving it which is great, I just can’t really believe it still to be honest,” he added.
The Guardian also reported that the graffiti removal team for the local borough authority, the Islington council, is aware of the artwork and does not plan to remove it.
The installation of the mural in London follows the recent shipment of New York City’s cherished Banksy mural, Ghetto 4 Life, from its home in the South Bronx to Bridgeport, Connecticut.
That artwork shows a posh young schoolboy spray-painting the phrase “Ghetto 4 Life” while a butler holds a tray of spray cans. It was removed from the Melrose building at 651 Elton Avenue on February 26 as part of the structure’s demolition for the future construction of a charter school. It was painted as part of the street artist’s “Better Out Than In” residency in the city in October 2013.
Last December, a new work by Banksy in London was also taken shortly after it was installed on a street sign. Three images of aircraft resembling military drones had been painted on a metal traffic stop sign. The artwork had been installed in the South London neighborhood of Peckham and posted on Banksy’s Instagram page only hours before two people used bolt cutters and a Lime bicycle to remove it.
