Banksy Exhibition

Visited Bristol Museum and Art Gallery with my daughter to see the ‘Banksy’ exhibition. Approaching along Park Row, with fifty yards to go, I could already see a queue outside the entrance. ‘Not too bad’, I thought – but was then directed further along and up a side street – to join the rest of the queue. Three lines of barriers, each 100 yards long, containing close to a thousand people snaking patiently up and down the road, meant a two hour shuffle to eventually reach the gallery entrance.

An enterprising, and no doubt very happy, ice-cream vendor had parked at the top of the road. He had a ready-formed queue passing his van at just the right pace to make the purchase of an ice-cream easy. Few resisted.

I hoped the exhibition would be worth the wait.

We were not disappointed. The exhibition was fun, but at the same time it had serious intent. Banksy the anarchist; the urban terrorist; is now showing easily understood, commissioned images, in sculptural, animatronic and 2 dimensional form, and it was being enjoyed by all ages – children through to elderly. If you go, don’t miss the expressions of each of the chimps in the House of Commons. Fantastic! This will be one of my ‘memorable’ exhibitions. Banksy’s work  appealed through its humour, and as I was walking away from the gallery, it was difficult to stop seeing Banksy-like images around the streets and back to the car-park.