Banksy returns to Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition with Brexit-themed work

Street artist Banksy is offering another Brexit message at this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts.

The anonymous artist has entered an installation titled “Keep Ou” into the prestigious London art show.

Banksy’s work is a customs arch for EU arrivals, said to be “salvaged from Heathrow airport”, over a shuttered gate featuring the words of the piece’s title.

The missing “T” is being used by a rat to try and break open a padlock at the bottom of the gate.

It is the second year in a row that Banksy has entered the Summer Exhibition, which runs this year from 10 June to 12 August.

In 2018, he submitted a reworked Vote Leave from the EU referendum, which instead read “Vote to Love”.

Banksy revealed on Instagram that an early version of the piece, submitted under the pseudonym Bryan S Gaakman – an anagram of “Banksy anagram”, was refused.

A month later, the artist revealed, he was contacted by exhibition co-ordinator Grayson Perry asking him to submit something, so he re-submitted the piece.

That piece was priced at £350m – a reference to the Vote Leave campaign’s claim of how much the UK sends to the EU per week.

Banksy’s work for this year has no specific price, with interested parties told to refer to the sales desk.

In 2017, in another previous Brexit-inspired work, Banksy created a mural on the side of a building in Dover showing a workman shipping away at one of the stars of the EU flag.

Last month, workers moved a painted Banksy mural from the side of a steelworker’s garage in South Wales.

The “Season’s Greetings” mural, which appeared in Taibach, Port Talbot, last year, was being relocated to a new art museum in the town’s centre.

The stencil, which shows a child dressed for snow playing in the falling ash and smoke from a skip fire, is thought to be a comment on pollution from the industrial town’s steel works.

(c) Sky News 2019: Banksy returns to Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition with Brexit-themed work