Radar Rat, 2002

Done in Banksy’s iconic spray-stencil style, Radar Rat portrays a rat standing on its hind legs, wearing headphones and holding radar equipment with a hand-sprayed coral-red spiral in the background. He appears to be listening intently to the world around him, in what seems to be a comment on the ever-increasing presence of surveillance equipment in cities such as London.

Radar Rat can also be seen on a few walls in the streets of London, including King’s Road, and was later released as a very rare screen-print in 2004 as well as on the cover of Dirty Funker’s Future album in 2008.

The popularity of the rat as a symbol in street art is attributed to Blek Le Rat, a French stencil artist who initiated the urban art movement in France in the 80s. Also known as Xavier Prou, the “Father of stencil graffiti art”, began to spray-paint small rats in the streets of Paris and on the banks of the Seine… “Because rats are the only wild animals living in cities, and only rats will survive when the human race disappears and dies out. I wanted to do a rat invasion. I put thousands all over Paris.”

Rats play a major role in Banksy’s iconography and are said to be emblematic of street art itself. In his 2005 autobiographical book Wall and Piece, which features over 30 different representations of rats from the artist’s early career painted in the United Kingdom and Germany, Banksy states: