A painting by the anonymous British street artist Banksy recently sold for £7.6 million (~$9.8 million) at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction in London. Surpassing its pre-sale estimate of £3 million (~$3.9 million) to £5 million (~$6.5 million), it is the second-highest price ever paid for a work by the artist.
In “Show Me the Monet” (2005), Banksy puts his own spin on Claude Monet’s iconic paintings of a Japanese-style wooden footbridge in his water lily garden in Giverny. Banksy interrupts the tranquil Impressionist scene with half-submerged shopping carts and a bright orange traffic cone, and he offers a critique of consumerism, excess, and environmental waste.
The work was included in one of Banksy’s earliest gallery exhibitions, Crude Oils: A Gallery of Re-mixed Masterpieces, Vandalism and Vermin, held at 100 Westbourne Grove in London in 2005. It was among 22 hand-painted canvases that reworked and subverted traditional modern masterpieces, including a painting of a vase filled with dead sunflowers based on one of Vincent Van Gogh’s most recognizable images and a portrait of the model Kate Moss based on Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn Monroe” series.
The show also notably included 164 live rats, a living representation of one of Banksy’s recurring motifs. Early on in his career, he spray-painted the rodents onto London subway cars and murals as a form of social commentary, inspired by the French graffiti artist Blek le Rat; they continue to feature prominently in his works.
Last October, Sotheby’s sold Banksy’s “Devolved Parliament” (2009), an oil on canvas depicting Britain’s House of Commons overrun by chimpanzees, for £9.9 million with fees (~$12.1 million), setting an auction high for the artist.
