Banksy comes home for Bristol show

The world's most famous living artist is coming home. Banksy has sneaked his biggest ever UK exhibition into Bristol.

The Bristol Evening Post can reveal that the mysterious artist, best known for his subversive stencil graffiti work, has taken over much of Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery.

People have already started queuing to get a first look at the exhibition.

Speaking exclusively to the Bristol Evening Post, Banksy said: "The people of Bristol have always been very good to me – I decided the best way to show my appreciation was by putting a bunch of old toilets and some live chicken nuggets in their museum.

"I could have taken the show to a lot of places, but they do a very nice cup of tea in the museum."

Banksy's Summer Show, entitled Banksy vs Bristol Museum, opens to the public tomorrow, and will run for three months. Admission will be free.

The surprise show will come as a shock to the city, as sources close to the elusive artist have revealed that just half a dozen people knew of Banksy's plans.

Speculation began among Banksy's online followers earlier this week, after the artist replaced his official website with a single unsavoury image of an ice cream cone dropped in a pile of dog mess. Above the image was the simple message "Banksy Summer Show Opens June 13."

The show is expected to feature a range of different media – including sculpture, oil paintings, installations and animatronics, as well as stencil work.

The Bristol-born artist, who has never revealed his true identity, has become an iconic figure among the artistic community since his first pieces of graffiti appeared in the late 1980s.

His work, highly charged with a caustic, political sense of humour, soon gathered an enormous following.

Many of his most iconic pieces of graffiti have become landmarks in Bristol – from the distinctive Mild, Mild West mural in Stokes Croft, to the naked adulterer apparently hanging from a window on the wall of a sexual health clinic in Park Street.

But this exhibition will be the greatest gift he could have presented to his home city. It is likely to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors to Bristol throughout the summer. The last comparable show, held in a Los Angeles warehouse in 2006, lasted for just three days. That show attracted a host of Hollywood stars, all keenly clutching their chequebooks.

Christina Aguilera bought an original of Queen Victoria as a Lesbian and two prints for £25,000. None of the works in the Bristol exhibition will be for sale.

In May last year, Banksy hosted an exhibition in London called The Cans Festival, which took over a tunnel formerly used by Eurostar beneath Waterloo station. Graffiti artists with stencils were invited to join in and paint their own artwork, as long as it didn't cover anyone else's.

But the artist's most distinctive show to date took place last October, when he took over a New York pet shop. In the window he placed a realistic-looking leopard, which on closer inspection turned out to be an ingeniously-folded leopard-skin coat.

Other animatronic animals in the show included hot dogs, fish fingers swimming in a tank, and "snakes", which on closer inspection were strings of sausages.

Banksy personally requested that news of his latest show should be revealed in his home city's local newspaper.

We have also been offered an exclusive sneak preview of the show today, ahead of its opening. There will be more pictures to follow, and don't miss your copy of the Bristol Evening Post tomorrow.