Punk

Gangsta Rat

2004 Silkscreen print 50x35 cm

The Banksy gangster rat mimics the American “gangsta” (according to urban jargon) rappers of the 1990s, icons of hip hop culture who influenced the artist during his training in Bristol. The rats rank among Banksy’s most depicted subjects, he writes: “They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilisations to their knees.” The artist captures a parallelism between rats and the condition in which street artists are, which also serves to warn us against quiet masses. Banksy’s rats are often thought to have been borrowed from the repertoire of another street artist, the French artist Blek Le Rat, who during the 1980s disseminated his rodent inspired artworks throughout Paris with a fashion akin to that of the

Radar Rat

2008 Offset lithograph on record sleeve 31x62 cm

British artist. Banksy’s Gangsta Rat sits next to a large portable stereo, a typical hip hop accessory also known as a “boom box”. Scrawled above the rat in contemporary “style writing” are the letters “POW”, a reference to Banksy’s print house, Pictures On Walls, but also to the better known form of this acronym: Prisoner of War.

Rubber Ducky

2006 Acrylic paint on canvas 91x91 cm

Rubber Ducky. The titles of Banksy’s works are almost always simple captions of what the image represents—in this case, the child’s bath toy. This is a very rare freehand acrylic painting done in 2006—one of the years when the artist produced some of his most well-known masterpieces, days when his art was welcomed by the Hollywood stars flocking to the Barely Legal exhibition in Los Angeles. The scene depicts a duckling in a domestic bath setting; but we see a shark emerging beneath the surface of the water. The metaphor is clear: the large fish has already eaten the little fish, and is now turning its efforts to ducklings. Banksy is one of just a handful of artists who address the issue of protecting childhood growing in a world where it is considered a market segment, a product of global marketing. Once again, the artist produces an image to shake our ethics, an iconic soft power that spurs us towards a critical counterbalance against amoral commodification.

Monkey Queen

2003 Silkscreen print 50x35 cm

Monkey Queen is an artwork that was published as a series of 750 serigraph editions in 2003 and sold during an exhibition entitled Turf War, which was held in a warehouse in Kingsland Road in East London in the summer of 2003. The exhibition featured a stencilled image depicting Queen Elizabeth II with the face of a monkey, framed in an oval on the background of the British flag. In the serigraph version Banksy, whilst reproducing the colors of the British flag, chose to modify the background to imply a shooting target. The Monkey Queen first appeared stencilled on the central window of the London club, Chill Out Zone. Local authorities asked for its removal on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee on the fiftieth anniversary of her coronation. Along with rats, monkeys are a recurring animal motif which Banksy uses to construct meanings, serving in addition as an effective critique of power in various works. One particularly famous Banksy artwork represents the British parliament as entirely populated by monkeys. Banksy commented: “The highest position in British society is not a reward for talent or hard work, but a birth accident... God Save the Queen”, emphasising how the task of making decisions on behalf of the people is not a result of commitment, but accident. It should be noted here that Banksy himself often wears a monkey mask in his public portraits.

Laugh Now

2003 Silkscreen print 70x48,5 cm

Laugh Now: “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge” is written on the sandwich board hanging around the monkey’s neck, which appeared for the first time in 2002 when it was commissioned by a nightclub in Brighton. Since then, the artist has replicated the work many times as noncommissioned street art, an installation, a silkscreen print and a stencil on canvas. As a silkscreen print, it was displayed for the first time in the 2002 exhibition Existencilism at the 33 1/3 in Los Angeles. Monkeys are a recurring theme in Banksy’s repertoire. The artist believes that, since the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), humans have done everything to ridicule their closest relatives. Banksy’s monkey attests to the arrogance of humanity towards other species, drawing a parallel between man’s ability to create art. Even graffiti was, not coincidently, ridiculed in disparaging ways. Banksy, however, believes that street art is one of the most powerful forms of artistic expression out there today. Banksy argues, “The people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl their giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff.”