Home Sweet Home, 2006
Modified oil on canvas, in artist’s frame
80×110 cm (31 1/2 x 43 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Bansky 06’ on the reverse
Provenance
Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Exhibited
Los Angeles, Barely Legal, 15 – 17 September 2006
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Banksy vs. Bristol Museum, 13 June – 31 August 2009
Auction History
Phillips London: 2 March 2023
GBP 1,742,000
Banksy – 20th Century & Contemporary A… Lot 21 March 2023 | Phillips
No stranger to staging interventions in public space and sparking debates about its uses and abuses, in 2009 Banksy took this practice indoors for the landmark exhibition Banksy vs The Bristol Museum. Taking over the historical building and its collection, Banksy transformed the space into ‘a menagerie of Unnatural History’, disrupting the curatorial logic of the museum as a way of provoking a conversation around who decides which objects belong in museums and why. Alongside larger installations and sculptural pieces ‘adjusted’ in characteristic Banksy fashion, the exhibition took advantage of its location to place objects from the collection into direct dialogue with examples of Banksy’s Vandalised Oils series, radically extending the underlying premise of this body of work as a witty challenge to the art historical canon and the broader cultural assumptions that it maintains. Loaned by the current owner to the Moca Museum in Barcelona, Home Sweet Home has also been included in some of Banksy’s most notorious exhibitions including his Los Angeles debut, Barely Legal and Banksy vs the Bristol Museum.
Littered with stencilled CCTV cameras, rubbish, burnt-out cars, and military helicopters, the broader group of Vandalised Paintings to which the present work belongs made their first appearance alongside some 200 live rats in a disused commercial space in London’s affluent Notting Hill in Banksy’s Crude Oils exhibition. In their own way, these works are highly representative of our contemporary landscape, Home Sweet Home in particular highlighting the gap between certain assumed truths about England and Englishness and the lived realities of environmental damage and the engineering of ‘hostile environments’. A phrase commonly seen embroidered and framed on the walls of our grandparent’s homes and associated with a twee brand of Englishness that reinforces the structures of the home and family in the bourgeois imagination, the words themselves express a sense of pride and gratitude in the order and security of our domestic space.
John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821, The National Gallery, London. Image: © The National Gallery, London/Scala, Florence
Set within a heavy gilt frame evoking museum walls and Old Master paintings, the work is composed of an appropriated canvas featuring a bucolic and typically English landscape complete with a chocolate box cottage and a lilting stone bridge over a gently running stream in a manner that directly references John Constable’s The Hay Wain – a quintessential image of both England and Englishness as it exists in popular imagination. Brightly colored and richly detailed, the work has something of a Disney idealism to it, further emphasizing the gap between fantasy and reality in definitions of England or ‘Home’ today. Unlike some of the Vandalised Oils in which the subversive message is spraypainted over the canvas with the aid of a stencil, Home Sweet Home is a rare example of Banksy’s hand-painted additions, comparable to its sister painting, Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was installed alongside the present work in the Banksy vs Bristol exhibition.
In its clever combination of humor, appropriation, and the pointed conflation of so-called high and low art forms, Home Sweet Home follows in the disruptive mode of Situationist artists such as Asger Jorn. Appropriating reproductions of well-known paintings and the canvases of amateur artists, Jorn applied thick, gestural marks and compositional additions, altering the meaning communicated by the original work in the process. Following Jorn, Banksy’s recontextualization of these original canvases serves to emphasize that ‘the meaning of old-fashioned paintings had not yet been exhausted but could be renewed by means of new and unexpected pictorial inserts.’
Asger Jorn, Hirschbrunft im Wilden Kaiser (Deer in Heat in the Wilder Kaiser), 1960
Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Image: Scala, Florence/bpk, Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin, Artwork: © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/ DACS 2023
Finding innovative ways to translate a graffiti sensibility onto canvas, the defaced oil paintings represent a significant moment in the development of Banksy’s practice, and of the scope of his institutional critique. They also shine a light on our definitions of the notion of vandalism itself. Typically defined as a negative and anti-social act, ‘vandalism’ is the catch-all term used to describe the work of graffiti artists and used to punish offenders by law. Embracing these definitions, Banksy’s Home Sweet Home extends the guerrilla tactics that he honed as a street artist, speaking truth to power and asking pointed and pertinent questions about the distinctions between preservation and vandalism, and who, ultimately polices such distinctions.
