Banksy on display in Mestre with more than 70 works and 3 original murals

In Mestre, street art makes its entrance into the halls of M9 - Museo del ’900 with the works of one of its most famous interpreters: Banksy. From February 23 to June 2, 2024, the exhibition Banksy. Painting Walls, produced and organized by MetaMorfosi Eventi in collaboration with M9 and with the support of Banca Ifis. Curated by Sabina De Gregori, the exhibition aims to represent a step forward in M9’s dialogue with the languages of contemporary art, adopted as a tool to tell the story, embracing the issues of our time and promoting reflection.

The exhibition, as is almost always the case, has not been authorized by Banksy, and intends to guide visitors inside Banksy’s imagination. An artistic universe characterized by the contrasts and contradictions rooted in the twentieth century and reflected in today’s emergencies: from the climate crisis to global conflicts and migratory phenomena.

The exhibition features more than seventy works, at the center of which are three original murals painted by Banksy in 2009, 2010, and 2018 from private collections. These murals feature three teenagers, symbols of a new generation sensitive to issues dear to the British artist. An iconic exhibit is Season’s Greetings, which appeared in 2018 in Port Talbot, Wales, a city named that year by the WHO as the most polluted in the United Kingdom. The mural depicts a young boy with his arms wide open and tongue outstretched to savor the snowflakes falling from the sky. However, upon turning the corner of the wall, it turns out that those flakes are actually ash lifted from a burning garbage can.

Alongside Season’s Greetings, Heart Boy and Robot/Computer Boy complete, along with the other unique pieces on display, the artistic landscape of an exhibition that aims to make us reflect on the immediate paradox represented by the process of sacralization of public art. This art, originally conceived for democratic enjoyment, is estranged from its context, exposed to market interests, and finally musealized. The contradictions depicted by Banksy’s works, with his distinctive satirical and denunciatory style, themselves become the object of an even more pronounced contradiction, generated by the breakdown of the dialogical relationship between street art and the urban fabric.

The dialogue between work and context takes on further significance with the exhibition as a function of time and exhibition space: Banksy. Painting Walls comes to M9 five years after the creation of the work Migrant Child in Venice. This mural, located in Dorsoduro and recently announced as undergoing a restoration process financed by Banca Ifis, the exhibition’s main sponsor, will thus be a direct interlocutor in an exhibition that aims to be a bridge between the lagoon and the mainland. The invitation will be to move between the two places, with guided tours and urban bike rides that stimulate discussion on the role of heritage in cities.

The intent to create bridges and connections between places and people is at the heart of the parallel exhibition Urban Dialogues. Street art vs. museum, a retrospective on street artists and writers active in the Veneto region, on display in the second floor corridor. In dialogue with Banksy, works by some 20 artists operating from the 1990s to the present offer a broader context. The exhibition will be on view during the same period as Banksy. Painting Walls, and will be accompanied by a series of live paintings for twelve Saturdays, from March 2 to June 1. The street artists on display (Ezos, KayOne, Smoke One, La.Fe.De., Cizerocentodieci (C0110), Evyrein, Sambuco, Mike 128, Slog175, Mister Clay, Jah, SteReal, Tony Gallo, Sqon, Skaione, Seneca, Pocket Clouds, Zor) will perform on M9’s exterior walls, transforming them into unique and ephemeral works: each week, in fact, a new artist will cover the previous week’s work, changing the surface itself.

Other side events will include talks, dialogues and free lectures by curator Sabina de Gregori, M9 - Museo del ’900 Director Serena Bertolucci and several experts and academics. These events will help broaden the horizons of discussion on Banksy’s works, offering insights into the evolution of capitalism and consumer society.

"We like to think of Banksy. Painting walls as the exhibition of connections," says Serena Bertolucci, director of M9. “Those that relate the museum and the artist, that explore the 20th century by interrogating it with different languages and approaches. In this exhibition, every aspect of this century finds a shore in the path of the permanent exhibition of M9, which thus acquires new energy and depth in a dialogue between the modes of narration and treatment of History and of stories, the smallest and simplest ones, which in Banksy become synecdoche, significant parts of a larger whole. It is also, the exhibition of connections between the lagoon and the mainland and between different interpretations of public art, those of Banksy and many other Italian artists, that we want to tell not only inside the Museum, but also outside it.”

“I would like, with this exhibition,” says curator Sabina De Gregori, “to give another definition to Street Art. It is no longer about the romantic, but completely extinct, idea of graffiti as an art of rebellion that moves in illegality. Banksy knows exactly whether the wall where he is going to paint belongs to a private individual or not, and he knows full well the fate of his piece. A new criticism must arise to accompany the work to the protection and understanding of this art form that is already art current. The path of street artists is accomplished in their form but not in their substance, because graffiti can be, and still is, the voice and mirror of our time: that thermometer that goes up and down and helps us understand who and how we are.”

Banksy on display in Mestre with more than 70 works and 3 original murals

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