NO MORE HEROES

No More Heroes

Created during Banksy's highly productive visit to Los Angeles in September 2006, No More Heroes depicts Robin, Batman's celebrated sidekick, suspended high above Melrose Avenue. The young superhero holds a paint can and roller, apparently responsible for the enormous red inscription “NO MORE HEROES” stretching across the wall beside him.

The contradiction is characteristically simple. Banksy takes one of popular culture's most recognizable heroic figures and turns him into a graffiti writer announcing the end of heroes. Robin is no longer fighting crime; he is committing an act of vandalism.

Banksy in Los Angeles

The mural appeared in September 2006, at the time of Banksy's landmark Los Angeles exhibition Barely Legal. A photograph taken on 11 September 2006 described the paint as apparently still wet, providing unusually precise contemporary documentation for its appearance.

Positioned prominently above the shops on Melrose Avenue, the work also played naturally against Los Angeles itself—a city built around entertainment, celebrity and the manufacture of larger-than-life figures. No More Heroes reduces that mythology to an irreverent contradiction: even the superhero has abandoned heroism and picked up a spray can.