Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Auction History
Phillips London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 2,200,000 – 2,800,000
Price realized: GBP 2,710,000 / USD 3,288,885

Banksy – 20th Century & Contemporary… Lot 32 October 2023 | Phillips

Emphasizing the blend of linguistic dexterity and sharp social commentary that the anonymous street artist Banksy has become best known for over the years, Forgive Us Our Trespassing playfully evokes the Christian petition to ‘Forgive us our trespasses’, upending its meaning through the subtle substitution of one word for another.

Executed on a large scale and featuring a young child kneeling in prayer before a monumental Gothic stained-glass window with his head bowed towards his hands, the composition draws on the familiar iconography of devotional images, only to undercut this set of visual cues with the addition of contemporary urban clothing and the tools of the graffiti artist’s trade by the child’s side. His hoodie pulled up over a baseball cap, the child’s ‘trespassing’ here points to the fundamental action of graffiti and street art as a breaking of boundaries – both the physical boundaries of private property that is tagged in the process, and the questioning of societal rules that it often provokes.

[Left] Joshua Reynolds, The Little Samuel in Prayer, 1777, Musée Fabre, Montpellier. Image: © Photo Josse / Bridgeman Images
[Right] Detail of the present work

With its own long and often overlooked history stretching back to the Middle Ages, stained glass represents a fascinating aspect of our shared visual culture, and the role of images in communicating culturally important messages. Used almost exclusively in the decoration of churches and religious buildings before the 19^th century, stained glass proved to be a versatile and valuable material, aiding devotional contemplation in muting the outside world, controlling the flow of light, and illustrating key scenes from the Bible, the lives of the saints or as a means of honouring local guilds and other patrons. Alongside illuminated manuscripts, stained glass represents the only major form of pictorial art to have survived the centuries and emphasises the hugely important role played by visual narratives in communicating important messages embedded in texts that were otherwise illegible to the masses. Given the religious significance of light itself, the effects of the gently shifting and brilliantly colored patterns filtered through the glass was easily wedded to the ceremonial reverence of the space and its contemplative purpose, a testament to the skill of the artisans who worked on these stunning projects.

The north rose window of the Chartres Cathedral, Chartres. Image: PtrQs

Echoing the shape of Gothic Rose windows, the colorful panels that fill the vaulting frame of Forgive Us Our Trespassing are not the biblical scenes that typically animate stained glass windows, but the looping scrawls and tags of the graffiti artist. Creating his own visual narrative of the history of street art, we can even discern familiar tags including Jean-Michel Basquiat’s iconic skull and crown, and graffiti artist Amok’s recognizable insignia. Kneeling in prayer before this alternative altar, the young child in the foreground pays homage to this the icons of the past, perhaps even contributing to their legacies. Just as the work of medieval artisans gives us a window into the world in which they were created, Banksy seems to suggest here that the graffiti artist occupies an equivalent position, providing an important social commentary on our own times one for which, perhaps, they deserve to be forgiven.

An iconic Banksy image, the figure of the kneeling boy first appeared in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2010 and was used in the same year as one of the key images in the promotion of the artist’s film, Exit Through the Gift Shop. Coming to auction for the first time, the present work is one of only two compositions to feature the same pictorial elements, the first having achieved one of the highest prices at auction for the artist when it was sold in 2020. The smaller of the two, the present work was exhibited at Palazzo Cipola, Rome in 2016 and has been on long-term loan to the esteemed MOCO Museum in Barcelona, a testament to its significance, both within the context of Banksy’s practice, and in the broader landscape of contemporary art.

“Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better-looking place.”

In this context, the idea that a child could commit a sin (or a crime) in the act of being creative recasts graffiti and street art in quite a different light, Banksy proving highly adept at invoking certain assumptions, vocabulary, and beliefs in order to turn a mirror onto the hypocrisies and inequalities in our society. An image of the street artist as a child, Forgive Us Our Trespassing emphasizes the creativity and expressive freedom that graffiti represents, and the essential role that it plays in contemporary visual culture.