Saturday, 18 August 2007

Warhol vs Banksy at The Hospital

A face to face show of classic drawings and paintings by Andy Warhol set against the infamous graffiti work of Banksy.

The Hospital Gallery is delighted to present Warhol Vs Banksy; the first exhibition anywhere by the world’s two hottest artists today. Campbell’s or Tesco? Grace Kelly, Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill, Mick Jagger, Queen Elizabeth, The Beatles, Smiley Man police statue, Andy Warhol himself and others make for a potent cocktail of celebrity, satire and voyeurism. Upon contact opposing pictures are explosive for their contrast, even of the same subject.

Pollock Fine Art in association with The Hospital present the first exhibition anywhere, of over 40 mixed media works by Banksy and Andy Warhol.

Banksy is a well-known pseudo-anonymous British graffiti artist. He is believed to be a native of Yate, South Gloucestershire, near Bristol and to have been born in 1974,but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and personal and biographical details. According to Tristan Manco, Banksy "was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier engineer, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s." His artworks are often-satirical pieces of art on topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti writing with a distinctive stencilling technique, is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris and members of the anarcho-punk band Crass who maintained a graffiti stencil campaign on the London Tube System in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His art has appeared in cities around the world.Banksy's work was born out of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians.

Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti or mount exhibitions of screenprints in commercial galleries. Art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder.

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