Mr. Brainwash’s artwork “Banksy Thrower” goes back to an almost identical image of his idol Banksy. The Flower Thrower or Love is in the Air is one of Banksy’s most iconic stencils. It shows a masked Palestinian throwing a bouquet of flowers.

The motif first appeared on a wall at the side of a garage on the Beit Sahour highway in the West Bank opposite a car dealership in Jerusalem. The man in the picture is wearing a scarf and a baseball cap and seems to be angrily pointing the flowers at someone and wanting to throw them at him.

The portrait is reminiscent of the pictures of the street and campus riots of the 1960s. The rage and frustration can be seen in the attitude of the man trying to bombard the establishment with flowers.

The facial expression and the posture of the man on the mural are characteristically suggestive of a violent intent. However, by replacing a stone or a Molotov cocktail with a bouquet of flowers, Banksy is advocating peace rather than violence. The place itself is at the center of the message behind the painting.

Mr. Brainwash, in turn, humorously translates Banksy’s motif into his visual language. The bouquet of flowers is replaced by the book “Art for Dummies”. The book by Thomas Hoving, the former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a popular guide and an introduction to art history and is still for sale. The path to becoming one of the most successful artists of recent years was created for Mr. Brainwash by the Oscar-winning film “Exit Through the Gift Shop” which received many prices. In the documentary film Thierry Guetta meets the Street Art Star Banksy, who encourages him to become active as an artist himself under the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash.

After the auction record at Sotheby’s in London in October 2020 for a Banksy painting, Street Art increasingly comes into the focus of international collectors and increasingly replaces the Pop Art of the sixties. The names Banksy and Mr. Brainwash have been inextricably linked since the film “Exit Through the Gift Shop” and there are still numerous quotations about Banksy in Mr. Brainwash’s paintings which are for sale.

In 2022, the Mr. Brainwash Art Museum opened in Los Angeles. Located at 455 N Beverly Dr, Beverly Hills, California 90210, USA, the museum has become a Los Angeles attraction. For this reason, Mr. Brainwash, the popular Banksy protégé, is showing new works at Frank Fluegel Galerie in Nuremberg, Germany.

Mr. Brainwash – International Shooting Star

Hardly any other street art artist has experienced such a rapid rise as the Frenchman Thierry Guetta aka Mr. Brainwash, born in Garges-lès-Gonesse in 1966. His path to becoming the most successful artist of recent years is closely linked to the name Banksy and his Oscar-winning film Exit Through the Gift Shop: In this documentary Banksy encourages the then still unknown Guetta to become active as an artist himself under the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash. The rumor persists that the Frenchman Brainwash is a purely fictional person invented by Banksy and that his works are actually created by Banksy.

Like many Urban Art and Street Art artists, Mr. Brainwash uses well-known motifs like celebrities or comic icons and combines them with his very own signature messages of positivity: “Love is the Answer”, “Life is Beautiful” or “Follow Your Dreams”. The main motif is sprayed as a stencil with acrylic paint, whereas the background is composed differently as a collage or with mixed media. Old snippets from comic books, vintage brochures and other stencils let the viewer discover new details again and again.