Banksy confirms his authorship of the statue that appeared in central London

BarcelonaBanksy has struck again. The artist has confirmed through a video published on his social media that the statue that appeared in central London in the last few hours is his work. It is a sculpture erected on a pedestal that represents a man dressed as a politician, holding a flag that covers his face with his right hand, to natural scale. The man is walking with a firm step and about to fall into the void. The statue was first detected this Wednesday, and within a few hours the police had surrounded it with metal fences.

The statue is installed on Waterloo Place avenue, halfway between Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace, near the monument to those who fell in the Crimean War and statues erected in honor of historical figures such as Edward VII and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Banksy, whose identity is not known and continues to be the subject of speculation, has reviewed in the video confirming the authorship of the work to other emblematic monuments of the English capital, from the Big Ben tower to various equestrian statues or the monument to former Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In the video, a man is asked for his opinion on the statue: "I don't like it," he replies.

This is not the first statue Banksy has made in London. In 2004, he installed the statue The drinker in a small square in Princes Circus, on Shaftesbury Avenue, a kind of satirical version of Rodin's 'The Thinker'. But the most recent confirmed work by the artist in the British capital was a mural of two children lying on the ground and pointing to the sky. The message of the work was a criticism of the homelessness problem, as the children were pointing to the Centre Point Tower, a symbol of the homelessness crisis in London.