Neal Auction Company announce the inclusion of a contemporary work by the highly controversial British street artist Banksy within its July 13 & 14, 2013 Summer Estates Auction.
Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal. A city where everybody could draw wherever they liked, where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city like that felt like a party where everyone was invited… Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it’s wet.i – Banksy
Banksy is an artist who has developed a distinct style of graffiti that combines appropriated imagery from a variety of sources and media with social commentary. He has executed murals on buildings in locations as diverse as London, Melbourne and New Orleans. “Banksy’s work polarises opinion: people really do love it and hate it in equal measure… To his fans, he’s the cunning voice of dissent, staking the claim of the individual in a media-obsessed capitalist society…Where many street artists simply put forward their surreal messages in a ‘take it or leave it’ fashion without presenting any discourse with their work, Banksy offers some form of critical opinion time and time again.”ii
Banksy executes his art on public buildings, private buildings, and other kinds of structures and surfaces. Although Banksy originally used free-hand processes to spray his murals, he turned to stencils as a way of getting his images on the wall quickly before he could be stopped. His images are drawn or printed onto sheets of cardboard or acetate and painstakingly cut, as they are quite complex in their linear details.
Banksy made an appearance in New Orleans exactly three years after Hurricane Katrina struck the city in August of 2005 and “tagged” a dozen or so walls with his art and social commentary. After the visit, Keith Spera, from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, wrote: “If clandestine British artist Banksy ever returns to New Orleans, I’m going to wrap my house in canvas, set his favorite snack on the front porch and hope that, like Santa Claus, he shows up in the middle of the night bearing gifts… Any little doodle will do.”iii
Spera’s wish came true, but not for Spera. In 2008, after painting the notorious mural (now destroyed) of a homeless Abraham Lincoln on a wall located at the intersection of Cleveland and South Derbigny, Banksy created a smaller, portrait size version of Lincoln on cardboard and gave it to his friend, Neal Auction Company’s consignor.