Banksy, The Secretive Graffiti Legend, Is In Paris: See His Controversial Works

Famous street artist Banksy has descended in Paris with a collection of his work as a tribute to the May 1968 uprising.

The unsigned murals were sighted last week in the French city. On Wednesday, World Refugee Day, people in the north of the city were treated to a graffiti of a young black girl near a closed center for immigrants.

Paris Artworks

In the artwork, the girl is pictured with a blanket and a teddy bear at her feet. She is seen decorating a portion of the sidewalk with a pink wallpaper pattern to cover up a black swastika on the wall.

Jo Brooks, the artist's publicist confirmed that the works were Banksy's.

After which, the Bristol-based artist has posted the work on his Instagram.

After the first artwork, more stencils followed. A second mural appeared which reworked painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps on horseback by Jacques-Louis David. In the stencil, the red cloak is tightly wrapped around his face instead of flowing around him.

The artwork by the anonymous, yet world-famous artist is an apparent reference to the country's 2010 ban on face coverings in public places.

Banksy's Usual Motifs

Other artworks of Banksy in Paris depict rats, which is a usual motif he uses. One rat is pictured flying through the air while riding a champagne cork, and a pair walking near the famous Eiffel tower under a parasol.

To represent the uprising, Banksy even painted a picture of a rat who is seen holding a stencil pen and wearing a bandana over its face near the Pompidou Centre.

Another one showed the same animal dressed as Mini Mouse, sitting on top of the numbers 1968. One of his works shows a strict-looking man with a handsaw hidden on his back while offering a bone to a dog that has had part of its leg sawn off. It can be found near the Sorbonne, on the trendy Left Bank.

Two of the nine Banksy murals have been damaged, and most of the others have been covered by a Plexiglas in order to protect it. The artist concluded his Paris collection with a stencil on an emergency escape door to the Bataclan, the venue where 89 people were shot dead by Islamist militants in November 2015.

Here, Banksy drew an image of a mourning Muslim woman who has a resemblance to Mother Teresa. Most of Banksy's stark satirical images tackle issues such as poverty and migration.