HEN WITH FRIED EGG

Catalogue Note

Hen with Fried Egg was exhibited at Banksy's landmark Los Angeles exhibition Barely Legal in September 2006, where it appeared among a substantial group of unique works alongside Whatever, System Error, Toxic Lady, Waterfall and the originals associated with the six Barely Legal prints. Contemporary exhibition photography documents the composition on a metal panel: a black stencilled chicken stands before a frying pan containing a fried egg, confronting the cooked product of its own species.

The work belongs to Banksy's recurring use of animals to expose the absurdities of human behaviour. As with his rats, monkeys and farm animals, the chicken is given a situation that is immediately comprehensible yet logically impossible. The joke depends upon a brutally simple reversal: the relationship between animal and food, normally concealed by the mechanisms of consumption, is placed directly before the animal itself. The hen appears almost to contemplate the fried egg, turning an everyday breakfast into a compact image of mortality, consumption and perhaps even cannibalism.

There is also a characteristically Banksy-like economy to the composition. Unlike the elaborate vandalised paintings shown at Barely Legal, nothing here depends upon art-historical quotation or complex narrative. The black silhouette of the bird and frying pan against the untreated industrial surface is close to the visual language of Banksy's street work. The metal support, with its discoloration and reflective surface, becomes part of the image rather than a neutral ground. The bright egg at the centre of the pan provides the composition's visual and conceptual punch line.

Within Barely Legal, the work is a useful reminder of the breadth of Banksy's practice by 2006. The exhibition ranged from modified oils and large-scale canvases to sculpture, prints, installation and works executed on utilitarian materials. Hen with Fried Egg sits particularly close to his street vocabulary: an immediately legible stencil, an ordinary object or situation turned absurd, and a joke whose apparent simplicity masks a considerably darker proposition.