Banksy’s 2023 exhibition Cut & Run presented 25 years of stencil practice at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art.
The exhibition brought together original stencils, reconstructed street interventions and material explaining how several widely circulated works had been made.
Stencils behind familiar images
The display included stencils associated with Girl with Balloon and Kissing Coppers.
Rather than showing only finished images, the exhibition exposed the reusable tools through which Banksy developed a visual language capable of moving rapidly between walls and cities.
A model also explained the mechanism used to partially shred Girl with Balloon immediately after its sale at Sotheby’s in 2018.
The transformed work was renamed Love Is in the Bin.
An exhibition designed against habitual documentation
Visitors were not allowed to use phones inside the galleries.
The restriction removed the expectation that every work should be photographed and circulated immediately online, despite Banksy’s own dependence on mass reproduction and media attention.
Gallery staff reported that audiences largely accepted the rule and spent time with the material without screens.
The ten-week exhibition attracted visitors from a wide range of ages and backgrounds. Community tickets and overnight openings extended access beyond ordinary museum hours.
At the end of the Glasgow presentation, the organisers invited the public to propose the next location for the touring exhibition.
Cut & Run offered a controlled museum account of work created through anonymity and unauthorised public intervention.
That contradiction remained central: the exhibition preserved the methods behind ephemeral street images while placing them inside an institution designed to protect and manage their viewing.