BANKSY
Flower Thrower Triptych, 2017
Spray paint on canvas in artist’s frame, in three parts
Left panel: 84.5 x 64.1 cm (33 1/4 x 25 1/4 inches)
Center panel: 106.7 x 76.2 cm (42×30 inches)
Right panel: 42.2 x 52.3 cm (16 5/8 x 20 5/8 inches
Overall: 106.7 x 203.2 cm (42×80 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Banksy 2017’ (on the reverse of the left panel)
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner, 2017
Auction History
The Collection of Sir Elton John
Christie’s New-York: 21 February 2024
Estimated: USD 1,000,000 – 1,500,000
Price realized: USD 1,925,500
BANKSY, Flower Thrower Triptych | Christie’s (christies.com)
Thrower presents a variation of one of Banksy’s most iconic visuals entitled Love Is In The Air (Flower Thrower). The work shows a man with a bandana over his face frozen in the act of throwing neither a brick nor a Molotov cocktail, but a bouquet of flowers. This image conveys a message of peace. Except that is in this particular version, the visual is split into three parts, and presented as a deconstructed tryptic.
“As soon as I cut my first stencil, I could feel the power there. I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.”
An archetypal example of Banksy’s perceptive and stimulating commentaries on contemporary political and social events, Love is in the Air is one of the most recognizable works by the brilliant graffiti artist and offers a simple message of hope. In the tradition of other historically iconic images that preceded it, such as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Warhol’s Marilyn or Alfred Leete’s Lord Kitchener Wants You poster, Love is in the Air has been imitated and replicated countless times in a testament to its visual strength and power. It is indisputable that this bold and powerful work helped to establish Banksy’s place in art history, cementing his reputation as a pivotal and universally heard artistic voice.
Testament to the importance of the work and the power of its imagery—in which a masked figure of a militant stands poised to hurl a bouquet of flowers into the air—the original street intervention of Love is in the Air, was sprayed onto a wall in Palestine, and was chosen to illustrate the front cover of Banksy’s 2005 monograph Wall and Piece. The imagery of Love is in the Air is also illustrated within the book, accompanied by a passage on the toppling of the regime of President Ceausescu of Romania as told by John Simpson for BBC News. The work shares its title with the 1978 hit song by John Paul Young. Emblematic of Banksy’s wit, satire and dark humor, the title is expressive of the positive message of the work, that being the call for peace. Banksy’s iconic flower thrower has become synonymous with the artist’s thought-provoking oeuvre, a powerful image expressing the absurdity of war and the artist’s vocal advocacy for peace.
An activist for peace, Banksy is known for his striking, tongue-in-cheek street art and compelling images that disseminate his anti-war sentiments. Militarism, war and the overall advocacy for peace are key themes that Banksy explores throughout his oeuvre, juxtaposing symbols of peace with images of violence to intrigue the viewer and startle them from passivity. This can be seen in many of the artist’s most important graffiti works, particularly in those executed in the early 2000s, from the image of Mona Lisa holding a rocket launcher which appeared on a wall in Soho in 2001, to the little girl that cradles a missile in Banksy’s iconic Bomb Hugger and the banana-wielding protagonists of the artist’s Pulp Fiction. In Love is in the Air, Banksy’s masked subject adopts the pose of a violent protester, moments away from hurling his weapon into the air towards an unseen enemy.
A PEACEFUL PROTESTOR OFFERS A FLOWER TO THE MILITARY POLICE AT THE ANTI-VIETNAM WAR PROTEST AT THE PENTAGON IN OCTOBER 1967
However, Banksy takes the viewer by surprise, including a bouquet of flowers where the viewer would expect to see a weapon, such as a hand-grenade, brick or bomb. The inclusion of a bouquet of flowers recalls the flower power movement and student protests in the United States and France in the 1960s, and the iconic images of young men and women meeting guns with flowers that have memorialized these events in popular memory. During the protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, flowers became symbols of passive resistance and methods of non-violence, opposing the war and the atrocities it caused. With Love is in the Air, Banksy campaigns for peace rather than war, and evokes the notion of civil disobedience, highlighting the notion that weapons are not necessarily needed to achieve political or social change, and change can be achieved through non-violent means.
