Home / Art / Street Art

Banksy Ends 2020 With New COVID-19 Street Art of Sneezing Woman

By Emma Taggart on December 14, 2020

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Banksy (@banksy)

From his tribute to healthcare heroes to spray-painting his signature rat stencils in the London Underground, Banksy has been particularly prolific during the pandemic. The elusive street artist is back again with a new COVID-19-inspired piece that gives a nod to how the virus is affecting the elderly. Titled Aachoo!!, the thought-provoking mural appears on Vale Street, one of the steepest streets in Totterdown, Bristol. It features an old lady wandering up the 22-degree incline as she sneezes out her dentures, appearing to blow down an entire row of houses.

Aachoo!! appeared a few months after another site-specific work in Nottingham featuring a girl using a disassembled bicycle wheel as a hula hoop. Banksy took to Instagram last week to confirm the new COVID-inspired stenciled artwork was by him, simply putting the artwork’s title as the caption to several photos. In one of the images, the stenciled subject seems to sneeze so powerfully, that she knocks over a trash can and turns a passerby’s umbrella inside-out.

Photographer and Instagram user Feralthings also captured images of the new artwork. “The work’s visuals featuring false-teeth flying out the pensioner’s mouth references the antiquated seaside humor that is associated with places such as Weston-super-Mare, where Dismaland was staged in 2015,” they say. “But the subject matter, of course, also alludes to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic during the week in which the city has started vaccinating its elderly population.” Feralthings adds, “The house on which the stencil sits has been recently sold, so it appears that the new buyers have got more than they had bargained for!”

Check out Aachoo!! below.