Barbican Man

Created in the run up to the largest Basquiat exhibition ever staged in the UK, Banksy made this graffiti in a Basquiat style showing two police officers ‘welcoming’ the character.

An integral part of the New York art scene from the late 1970s until his death in 1988 at the age of 27, Basquiat was famed not only for his paintings, but for his undeniable influence across many other areas of popular culture. Just days before the opening of a major Basquiat exhibition at the Barbican, two Banksy pieces were spotted on the walls of the London gallery. The larger of the two Basquiat-inspired works appears to be Banksy's own take on Jean-Michel Basquiat's Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, created in 1982. Captioned "Portrait of Basquiat being welcomed by the Metropolitan Police – an (unofficial) collaboration with the new Basquiat show," it depicts a figure being frisked by two police officers. The second artwork shows people queueing for a ferris wheel adorned with crowns – a common motif in Basquiat's artwork – instead of passenger carts. The caption, “"Major new Basquiat show opens at the Barbican – a place that is normally very keen to clean any graffiti from its walls,” seems to mock the Barbican's motives for holding a retrospective of works by Basquiat, who started out as a graffiti artist.