Are fake Banksy paintings on display at the M9 Museum in Mestre? Here's what we know so far

Three fake Banksy works on display at the exhibition Banksy. Painting Walls being held at theM9 Museum in Mestre? The affair is holding court these days among art lovers. It all started a few days ago, when Stefano Antonelli, curator of several Banksy exhibitions and author of various books, articles and contributions on the British street artist, filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office in Venice (and one also in Ravenna, since a parallel exhibition affected, according to Antonelli, by the same problem is underway in Cervia), to denounce the presence of two works he believes are not authentic but that in the exhibition, curated by Sabina De Gregori, would be presented as originals.

The works are Dismaland 3D Rat, Dismaland Monkey TNT and Love Rat. Now, the three prints have been withdrawn from the exhibition, organized by the cultural association MetaMorfosi (also organizer of the Cervia exhibition), chaired by Pietro Folena, who, however, announces battle. The association’s argument centers on the fact that the works are presented to the public not as authentic works, but as testimonies of Dismaland. Metamorphosis, through a note, expressed its intention to sue Stefano Antonelli. “The expose reporting false news, the statements made in recent days to the media and the actions implemented by Antonelli -no stranger to behavior of this kind- configure a very serious injury to the credibility of our group,” Metamorphosis declares. “The decision to withdraw the disputed works from the exhibition in advance, even in the absence of any legal proceedings, in order to make them available to the competent authorities to carry out the necessary verifications, is a manifestation of a sense of responsibility and respect for public opinion to which the initiative of Antonelli, not satisfied with the trail of lawsuits and seizures that his company A&M Antonelli e Marziani S.r.l. recently suffered for an exhibition in Lecce, has conveyed false and distorted information.”

Antonelli, however, has stressed in recent hours that the works do not come from Dismaland. “I am obliged to point out that contrary to what Mr. Folena has publicly stated in recent days through various media, the three works that I have indicated as false works by Banksy to the competent authorities, do not come in any way from the event called Dismaland, are not in any way related to that event, and have never been sold, distributed, or only featured in that event works such as the three exhibited by the two curators at the Mestre and Cervia exhibitions, which are the subject of my report,” Antonelli states. “There are no ’Dismaland’ certificates, there are no Banksy works with ’Dismaland’ stamps. The Metamorphosis company claims that I am telling falsehoods, I would be happy to, because if I am telling falsehoods, then those works are real, and therefore we have discovered three new Banksy works worth millions. Unfortunately, however, they are resounding fakes, and in fact, so far they have not provided the press with the certifications that can disprove me.”

“The Metamorphosis company,” Antonelli continues, “claims that I am adept at these behaviors, I confirm this, every time I find a forgery I report it to the competent authorities, I report instead that the Metamorphosis company is adept at reprehensible conduct, such as the exhibition of Basquiat fakes they asked me to curate for them in April 2022, two months later the FBI seized the works and the museum fired the one who was introduced to me as their friend, the museum director, Aaron DeGroft. As Mr. Folena, who was in charge of organizing my Banksy exhibitions from 2018 to 2022, knows very well, I am a scholar, I catalog the works of the artists I am interested in and study their paths. If in a catalog of a public museum, a scholar finds fake works catalogued as real, he reports it to the Carabinieri Nucleo Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, which has precisely the purpose of protecting the work of the many professionals, scholars and the public itself, from conduct such as that enacted by Folena’s company, this is not a private matter, but a cultural matter.”

Banksy, in any case, is no stranger to incidents of forgery. It is just these days that the Mossos d’Esquadra, i.e., the Catalan police, seized in Barcelona several fake Banksy prints, which had been circulating on the art market for months.art, which were being produced in Zaragoza and offered to buyers as works made as part of the Dismaland project, the temporary playground Banksy installed in 2015 in Weston-super-Mare, an English town near Bristol, his hometown. The investigation against the forgers had begun in 2023 and led to the identification of four suspects who were offering the prints for sale at 1,500 euros each, along with fake certificates that would guarantee their authenticity. The office that certifies Banksy’s works, Pest Control, later confirmed that the seized works were fakes.

Pictured: a room in the exhibition at the M9 Museum in Mestre.

Are fake Banksy paintings on display at the M9 Museum in Mestre? Here's what we know so far

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