Nine months after his zoo-themed graffiti spree in London, Banksy is back.
According to his Instagram account, the artist’s latest work is a lone lighthouse, in his trademark black against a stucco wall, beaming light from its lantern room. Superimposed over the lighthouse is the message, “I want to be what you saw in me” written in a bold white font.
The lighthouse’s painted shadow connects to a bollard on a sidewalk but other than the image, Banksy provided no caption or means to identify its location. Within two hours of posting, the image had collected more than 300,000 likes.
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Apart from a Madonna and Child mural posted on December of last year, the lighthouse appears to be the first new work since Banksy’s 2023 “Beastly London” campaign, a nine-day burst of animal-themed murals scattered across the city. Elephants peeked from boarded windows in Chelsea, monkeys swung over Shoreditch, and a goat stood poised on the edge of collapse near Kew Bridge. There was also the now-infamous image of a rhinoceros enthusiastically mounting a Nissan Micra in Walthamstow—a piece that drew both laughter and laments before it was defaced and dismantled.
As usual, Banksy offered no clues to his newest work’s meaning. Instead, Instagram followers filled in the gaps, reading everything from critiques of state surveillance to commentary on media narratives into the stenciled creatures. One mural, featuring a police sentry box turned fish tank, was praised as a sly riff on Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark and will soon be enshrined in the new London Museum.
