King George V could never have imagined artists called Sickboy, Ponk and Filthy Luker would one day exhibit at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol.

When the royal title was bestowed on the Clifton arts centre in 1913, no one could have envisaged paintings from spray cans adorning its walls less than a century later.

But the rise in the popularity of graffiti has prompted the gallery and art centre into hosting a new show celebrating Bristol's influence on the genre.

More than 40 street artists from around the city will show their work at the RWA in an exhibition called Crimes of Passion, starting next month.

It will be the first urban art exhibition hosted by a public gallery in Bristol since the Arnolfini promoted a similar show in 1985.

Since then, Bristol's own Banksy has received global acclaim and has become a household name, with fans including celebrities Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

But Bristol has had a vibrant underground scene since the early 1980s, when Robert Del Naja, later of Massive Attack, became the city's first famous graffiti artist.

In recent years, that scene has burst into the mainstream and Crimes of Passion will feature a range of modern graffiti, almost all of which will be created specially for the show.

Artists with spray cans will spend the next few weeks painting their works on to walls and canvases inside the academy.

Katharine Cockshaw, of the Bath-based Fine Art Print Company, is acting as curator for the show alongside Bristol street artists Jono Boyle and Felix Braun.

She said: "Most of the artists featured in this exhibition continue to make work in the urban environment.

"Many have faced challenges from the law in the past for work that they have made on illegal sites, while most now seek opportunities for work in the public domain using permitted sites.

"We hope that in producing a show of this size and scale in a public gallery and through our planned programme of talks, events and educational activities, the public will see how this kind of art has begun to regenerate communities, challenging and entertaining people for a positive social purpose."

The exhibition is independently funded, with support from benefactors around the city, and will also see an educational programme happening at the Merchants Academy in Withywood.

Mr Braun, a 40-year-old graffiti artist and teacher from St Werburgh's, said he was pleased that a major art gallery was recognising the importance of street art in Bristol.

He said: "There are long-established graffiti artists from Bristol who are internationally renowned but who have had to travel abroad to make a living from it, which is a shame. So this show is a chance for Bristol to celebrate its part in the history of this art form in the same way that the rest of the world has been doing for the last 20 years.

"The commercialisation of street art has had positive and negative effects – we are finding a lot of copycats who come out of art school and say they want to be the next Banksy, which displays a real lack of originality.

"But it means that people like me and my peers are finding opportunities to make a career out of what they enjoy and this exhibition is a real coup for us."

Crimes of Passion: Street Art in Bristol opens at the Royal West of England Academy in Queen's Road on Saturday March 21 and will run until Saturday May 2.