The Flower Thrower, one of the most iconic and best-known pieces of stencil art by enigmatic British graffiti artist Banksy. Reportedly first created in 1999 in London, The Flower Thrower, which is also known as Rage and as Love is in the Air, most famously appeared as a large mural on a wall in Beit Sahour in the West Bank in 2003.
Much of Banksy’s artistic output has role reversal at its heart, whether he is equating traditional art with graffiti, depicting anarchy overturning authority, or, as in the case of The Flower Thrower, replacing a symbol of violence with a symbol of peace. The piece depicts a man wearing a baseball cap backwards with a scarf covering his face. The man’s stance, possibly inspired by photos of American antiwar protesters in the late 1960s and early 1970s, suggest that he is hurling a projectile, such as a rock or a Molotov cocktail, in rage, but the object that he is flinging is a bouquet of flowers. The mural depicts the man in black-and-white, but the flowers have color.
The Flower Thrower has since appeared in many other places and formats. Banksy used it as the cover art for his book Wall and Piece (2005). In 2003, 700 screen prints of the artwork were released. Unsanctioned versions of it began to proliferate, but Banksy’s efforts to trademark the image were ruled invalid by the European Union’s intellectual property office in 2020. As part of his effort to show his rights to such a trademark, Banksy created a triptych of the artwork in 2017. In addition, in 2021 a company that bought a screen print of The Flower Thrower at auction fractionalized it as 10,000 NFTs.
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