Banksy Returns to the Self-Portrait, 26 Years Later

Banksy has spent more than 25 years becoming one of the most recognisable artists in the world without publicly revealing his identity. Now, he has turned the focus onto himself.

Created for the 2026 Yalta European Strategy (YES) Annual Meeting in Kyiv, the monumental new work shows Banksy creating Judo Boy, the mural he painted on a bomb-damaged building in Borodyanka during his visit to Ukraine in 2022.

The original image shows a young child throwing a much larger man to the ground and quickly became associated with Ukrainian resistance following Russia's invasion. The larger figure was widely interpreted as Vladimir Putin, whose association with judo is well documented, and in 2023 the image was reproduced on an official Ukrainian postage stamp.

Its return four years later is significant. This year's YES conference was held under the theme Peace Through Strength NOW!, with founder Victor Pinchuk drawing a parallel between the child overcoming the larger opponent and Ukraine's continued resistance.

In 2000, Banksy created a work simply titled Self-Portrait. Measuring 122 × 122 cm, it depicts a life-sized figure holding a spray can in each hand. Instead of revealing his face, Banksy gave the figure the head of a chimpanzee.

The work was exhibited at Severnshed in Bristol that same year, at a very different point in Banksy's career. Many of the motifs that would later become synonymous with his work were already beginning to appear, including the monkey, which would go on to feature in works such as Laugh Now, Keep It Real and Monkey Queen.

Seven years later, Self-Portrait appeared at Bonhams in London and sold for £198,000 including buyer's premium.

The result provides an interesting marker for just how much the Banksy market and Banksy's wider position in contemporary art has changed since.

By the time Self-Portrait came to auction in 2007, Banksy's market was already developing quickly. What followed over the next decade took it considerably further.

In 2018, Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby's in London for just over £1 million before immediately beginning to pass through a shredder concealed inside its frame. Renamed Love is in the Bin, the work returned to Sotheby's three years later and sold for £18.6 million, establishing Banksy's current auction record.

His position within the art world has shifted alongside his market. Banksy's work is now held in major collections and has just entered the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. In 2005, Banksy secretly installed Peckham Rock inside the British Museum. More than two decades later, works are being acquired directly from his studio for a major new museum.

Against that backdrop, the comparison between Banksy's two self-portraits becomes particularly interesting. In 2000, Banksy depicted himself holding two spray cans, replacing his face with a chimpanzee. In 2026, he appears creating Judo Boy, returning to a work made during the war in Ukraine.

The circumstances surrounding the two images could hardly be more different. Between them are 26 years of exhibitions, street interventions, auction records, museum acquisitions and an extraordinary rise in Banksy's cultural profile. Yet the way Banksy chooses to represent himself remains remarkably similar. In both, we recognise him through what he is doing rather than what he looks like.

Perhaps that is what makes the latest work so fitting. More than 25 years after his first Self-Portrait, Banksy has become one of the world's most recognisable contemporary artists, and still doesn't need to show us his face.