The Herald has today exclusively revealed that Glasgow is to play host to a new exhibition by the most famous and celebrated graffiti artist in the world, Banksy.
‘CUT & RUN’, which has been officially authorised by Banksy, will reveal for the first time the stencils used to create many of the artist’s most iconic works.
Spanning from 1988 to the present day, Banksy calls the exhibition, which includes authentic artefacts, ephemera and the artist’s actual toilet, ‘25 years card labour’.
The new exhibition, the artist's first solo exhibition in the city, is being staged at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), the main gallery of contemporary art in Glasgow.
In a gallery label for the show, seen for the first time by The Herald, the artist reveals that the reason they chose Glasgow’s GoMA for their first solo exhibition in 13 years was the iconic traffic cone which (normally) sits atop the Duke of Wellington statue outside the gallery.
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Banksy adds that it is their “favourite work of art in the UK”.
The equestrian statue located outside the GoMA at Royal Exchange Square is regarded as one of Glasgow’s most iconic landmarks - and one symbolic of Glaswegians' unique sense of humour.
The Category A-listed statue of the Duke of Wellington on his favourite horse Copenhagen was sculpted by Italian artist Carlo Marochetti and erected in 1844.
It commemorates Arthur Wellesley, the British supreme commander during the Napoleonic Wars who became famous because of his victory in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Over the past four decades or so pranksters have placed an orange road traffic cone on the Duke’s head, making it an almost-permanent feature of the statue.
No one actually knows who the first person was to bravely clamber up the statue and place a cone on the Duke’s head, or when it first happened, although reports in 2000 suggested that the stunt had been taking place for at least a decade.
In 2011, the 'coneheid' statue was named by Lonely Planet as one of the top 10 most bizarre monuments on Earth.
In 2013, a public outcry caused Glasgow City Council to withdraw plans to raise the statue’s plinth to over 6ft in an effort to "deter all but the most determined of vandals" from placing traffic cones on the Duke’s head. The council claimed that the cost of removing the cone each time was £100.
The proposed £65,000 refurbishment aimed at ending the practice, which Glasgow City Council said projected a "depressing" image of Glasgow, was dropped after a petition attracted more than 10,000 signatures and a 'Save the Cone' Facebook page attracted over 70,000 likes.
Over the years, the Duke has sported a number of different ‘themed’ cones on his head as a form of protest or to coincide with major events.
In 2012, the statue sported a gold cone to commemorate team GBs success at the London 2012 Olympic Games, before the statue was given an Irn-Bru cone makeover by pranksters campaigning to restore original recipe in 2018.
And in 2020, the orange traffic cone was changed to a blue one with yellow stars to mark Britain’s official exit from the European Union.
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