A new artwork by Banksy has appeared in West London, one block from the Kew Bridge and the River Thames. The artist appeared to claim responsibility for the piece—a silhouette of a goat—on his Instagram account, where he posted a captionless image of the new artwork earlier today. The piece was discovered on the left side of a building bordering Kew Green.
The new mural depicts a goat on a precarious perch, with fragments of stone tumbling off the ledge on which it stands. Initially, the piece also incorporated a real-life CCTV that the artist pointed at the goat. However, the security camera has since been moved back to its original position. This detail foregrounds the theme of surveillance, which Banksy often explores in his work.
Surveillance is a particularly salient motif in Banksy’s oeuvre, given the artist’s enduring anonymity. His 2004 work What Are You Looking At, featuring a CCTV camera pointed at a wall on which the title text was stenciled, offered commentary on the increased presence of surveillance cameras in London, where the work was installed. In Spy Booth (2014), Banksy stenciled three government spies around an existing telephone booth in Cheltenham, England. The trio appeared to be listening in on the conversations of the phone booth’s users.
The last wall mural for which Banksy claimed credit appeared earlier this year in London’s Finsbury Park. In it, the artist used green paint to mimic foliage on a wall behind a trimmed tree. The artwork had been interpreted as a commentary on environmental degradation. This June, Banksy took responsibility for a stunt during Idles’s performance at Glastonbury Festival, where an inflatable life raft carrying figures representing migrants was sent across the crowd. The boat referred to small boats carrying asylum seekers across the English Channel, a target of the U.K.’s former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his immigration policy.
Though Banksy is known for guerrilla-style public artworks, he also commands high prices at auction. His current auction record is held by Love is in the Bin (2021), which sold for £18.58 million ($25.39 million) at Sotheby’s in 2021. The artwork is set to be displayed at Sotheby’s first retail store in Hong Kong.
