BANKSY (BRITISH)
Flower Girl, 2008
Black and silver aerosol and exterior semi-gloss on brick façade
Dimensions: 275×245 cm (9×8 feet)
Auction History
| Julien’s Auctions 6 December 2013 Est.: USD 150,000 – 300,000 |
Price Realized USD 212,500 BANKSY (BRITISH) FLOWER GIRL, 2008 |
Catalogue Note
A mural of a young girl in a dress holding a flower basket and staring quizzically up at a leafy vine upon which a surveillance camera with a rat tail has sprouted.
Flower Girl was executed with stencils on a Hollywood gas station wall in the dead of night by the notorious graffiti artist Banksy. Early in 2008 the gas station owner, Mr. Rosenberg, gave permission to Thierry Guetta, an LA artist known as Mr. Brainwash, allowing Guetta’s unidentified friend to create a mural on a plain brick façade facing Beverly Boulevard. After arriving to work the next morning, Rosenberg found Flower Girl materialized. Upon reviewing the tapes from his security cameras, he discovered around 4 a.m. the footage went mysteriously black. Not only obscuring the details of the mural’s creation but more importantly the physical identity of the elusive artist behind the work, Banksy.
The global industrial complex and the government’s prying eye are common themes in Banksy’s work. Here we see the camera’s cold face intruding into the innocent activity of a young girl picking flowers, provoking a sense of fear and doubt. Innocence is lost under the dubious gaze of the glass eye. Perhaps it is fitting that such a mural would be created in Hollywood, a land where beauty and youth rarely escape capture and exploitation on film.
Flower Girl was created during a time when Banksy was contemplating the production of his own film, which would feature a behind the scenes look at the underground world of street art. It was shortly after the creation of Flower Girl that Banksy contacted Jaimie D’Cruz with the request that he help produce such a documentary.
Exit Through The Gift Shop released in 2010 at the Sundance Film Festival, met with immediate success and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The surrounding publicity has helped to cement the acceptance of urban art into the art historical canon and has led to a major increase in the exposure of, interest in, and passion for such remarkable works of guerilla street art as Banksy’s unique mural Flower Girl.
