Banksy Artwork of Girl Hula-Hooping With Tire Spotted in U.K. (UPDATE)
The piece has already been vandalized.
UPDATE (October 19, 2020): Banksy has taken to his Instagram account to officially confirm that he was the artist behind the street art located outside a beauty salon in Nottingham, England. The work, which is now vandalized, portrays a girl hula-hooping with a tire beside a real, damaged bicycle locked to a lamppost with its rear wheel missing.
ORIGINAL STORY (October 16, 2020): A work of street art in the style of Banksy was recently spotted outside a beauty salon in Nottingham, England. Although the elusive artist hasn’t authenticated the work on his Instagram account or other means, visual elements of this newly stenciled piece are very similar to the ones in the artist’s prolific oeuvre. The graffiti portrays a girl hula-hooping with a tire beside a real, damaged bicycle locked to a lamppost with its rear wheel missing. The Nottingham City Council were set to place a temporary covering over it on Thursday, but the work had already been vandalized with white spray paint.
The salon’s shop owner, Alex Mitchell, claimed that he saw the artwork being made on Tuesday when a van “with blacked out windows” pulled up to his storefront, as per the BBC. “I only saw the driver. I didn’t know what was going on or whether I should call the police. He pretended like he had broken down but he was there for at least two hours.” At some point the anonymous man came into Mitchell’s salon and purchased two drinks. “I asked him ‘who is the artist’ and he just winked at me,” he said.
Nottingham currently has the highest coronavirus infection rates in the UK. ”Nottingham needs something like this right now – something to talk about rather than coronavirus,” said neighborhood resident, Josinya Powell, to BBC. “If it is Banksy that’d be amazing – I’d say to him ‘thanks babes’.”
Elsewhere in art, spatial designer Anthony Bright recently launched a virtual reality experience to find kidney donors.
