Rodeo Girl, 2009
Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner
Exhibited
Banksy vs. Bristol Museum, Bristol Museum, Bristol, 2009
Auction History
Artcurial Paris: 28 February 2017
Estimated: EUR 200,000 – 300,000
Price realized: EUR 379,500 / USD 415,795
Rodeo Girl is Banksy at his most Pop-infused and mischievous. A smiling 1950s-style pin-up, coming straight out of a mid-century Pepsi ad, rides a giant spray paint can as if it were a mechanical bull or a missile. Her cowgirl boots, flirty checkered blouse, and exuberant posture ooze Americana nostalgia. But the spray can, the ultimate tool of graffiti rebellion, grounds the piece in the urban grit of street art.
The juxtaposition is as cheeky as it is clever: innocence and rebellion, femininity and destruction, art and vandalism. Is she advertising graffiti as the new frontier? Or is she a relic of corporate visual culture, co-opted and weaponized by the very medium she once sought to suppress? Banksy turns the pin-up trope on its head, injecting the language of 20th-century consumerism with the anarchic DNA of spray cans and subversion. The result is a satirical yeehaw for the modern art outlaw.
