A graffiti artist gave top marks to a council clean up crew after spending two years teasing them about how to paint over his illegal street art.
Street artist Mobstr spent the last two years quizzing the removal team by spray painting a brick wall with clues on how they should cover them up.
Referring to himself as “The Examiner” the anonymous artist conducted six satirical tests on three walls of a London building.
After each test, he returned to the wall to check the team’s clean-up skills and awarded each pass with a tick.
Mobstr, who refuses to give his real name, hailed the workers for their high overall score but said his examinee did not seem to care.
He said: “It was a test I put to a graffiti removal team. They scored high.
“I would define this as an exam rather than an experiment.
“It was an odd one in that the examinee didn’t care about passing yet despite this the examiner really hoped they would.”
Mobstr, who started creating work in East London in the 1990s, has also created works using adverts and played games with council graffiti removers in his work ‘Red’.
In his most recent work, the cheeky artist selected a building partially covered in brown paint to conduct a two-year quiz between 2017 and 2019.
In his first test, he stencilled instructions onto the wall hinting at cleaners to use “a shade of poo” to cover up his graffiti.
The clean-up crew covered his message in brown paint, which the graffiti artist marked with a black tick to indicate they had passed.
Mobstr painted further clues asking for the surname of a character with a pet named Snoopy and a slang term for a boring individual – which he also ticked after they were covered up with brown painted squares.
He even asked for an imitation of a Mark Rothko painting which cleaners passed with flying colours when they painted over it with a brown block.
Cleaners failed just one out of six tests where they failed to paint a square but passed the retest.
At the end of his removal quiz, Mobstr awarded the crew with a “well done” graffiti tag and a smiley face.
When asked if there was a deeper meaning behind his quiz, Mobstr said: “Nope, just a simple quiz.”
He added: “I call it ‘Brown Shapes: A graffiti removal quiz.’
“It is over. I set out a list of tasks before I started and all of them have been completed.”
The graffiti artist is now focused on a new lab project set up in his studio.
He said: “Currently I’m working on a project with a friend that has involved setting up a laboratory in my studio.
“I think it’s a good one. I can’t say as to when it will be complete.
“We’ve been slowly working through how to execute it and it’s going well.”