A man long speculated to be Banksy has told people to 'grow up and get a life' after the famed artist was said to have been 'uncovered'.
Banksy has been delighting people with their art since the 1990s, with the world-renowned piece, 'The Mild Mild West', in Bristol, UK, putting them on the map.
You've also got 'Girl with Balloon', 'Flower Thrower', 'Choose Your Weapon', 'Laugh Now', and 'Kissing Coppers' as famed Banksy pieces.
Banksy's identity has remained a mystery for decades, though after a lot of digging, Reuters reported that the famed artist is an individual named Robin Gunningham.
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Police records show that a man with this moniker was arrested in September 2000 for defacing a billboard in New York City.
It's believed that Gunningham now goes by David Jones after legally changing their name.
Despite that, George Georgiou has been repeatedly mistaken for Banksy ever since he was snapped installing Perspex in London near one of Banksy's famed work.
Georgiou sat down with the Daily Mail recently to dismiss suggestion he is the masked, famed artist.
He told the outlet: "I'm not Banksy... It's really annoying, it's ridiculous and it's disturbing. The first day, it was a laugh. It's a bit of an old joke now."
The Londoner was only in the area because the painting was on a building owned by his sons.
He added: "When it first happened, there was less reaction than there is now.
"It ain't really anything that I'm worried about. It's just really annoying because I'm still working. It's just disrupting my day endlessly.
"It's just the day-to-day, every five minutes you pick up the bloody phone and it's just someone having a giggle.
"That's all it is. It's all harmless stuff, but when you're trying to get on with your life, it's just really annoying. It's just a pain in the butt."
A source recently confirmed to Reuters that a man named David Jones entered Ukraine in 2022 as numerous pieces of art appeared in the war-torn country.
It's believed the passport used by Jones has the same birthplace of that of Gunningham.
Banksy’s former manager, Stephen Lazarides, told Reuters: "There is no Robin Gunningham. The name you've got I killed years ago."
Mark Stephens, Banksy's lawyer, has since issued a statement stating that infamous artist 'does not accept that many of the details contained within your enquiry are correct'.
A timeline of the rise of Banksy:
1990s
Banksy's artwork starts cropping up around parts of Bristol, UK.
One of his first pieces in the city was some graffiti art mocking Vladimir Lenin. He used a stencil of the late dictator with a punk mohawk and hoop earring.
Arguably one of his first, well-known pieces was 'Mild Mild West', which depicted a teddy bear tossing a molatov cocktail at policemen in riot gear.
2000s
It was the the millenium that Banksy's famous stencils of monkeys and rats started to appear across London and other parts of the UK.
'Laugh Now' emerged in 2002 after the artist was commission by Ocean Rooms nightclub in Brighton. The artwork shows a chimp wearing a sandwich board that reads: "Laugh now, but one day we'll be in charge."
2002 also marked the release of Banksy's most famous graffiti art to date — 'Girl with Balloon'. This first appeared on London's Waterloo Bridge and later in Shoreditch.
Other notable pieces by Banksy in the 2000s include: 'Kissing Coppers', 'Grim Reaper', 'Flower Thrower', and 'One Nation Under CCTV'.
2010s and onwards
Banksy's 'Gorilla in a Pink Mask' was debuted in 2011 and it went on to be accidentally painted over. Fortunately the bold piece of work, located in Eastville, Bristol, was restored shortly after.
It was also in the 2010s that the artist started to move his artwork even further out of London in Bristol. In 2018 he died a piece called 'Season's Greetings' in Wales. This depicted the contents of a large trash can being burned while a child stuck their tongue out to eat the ashes, mistaking them for snowflakes.
The following year he did another festive piece in Birmingham. A homeless man was sleeping on a bench in the city and Banksy graffitied two reindeer painted to look like they are pulling the real public bench.
In 2022, Banksy's work then started to appear in Ukraine. He did a series of seven, anti-war street art murals across the country, many of which were in Kyiv.
The artist graffitied on the wreckage of damaged buildings caused by Ukraine's ongoing war with Russia.
Callum Jones