KEEP IT REAL, 2002

Provenance

• Sotheby’s S 2 Gallery, London
• Private Collection
• Anon. sale, Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 1 April 2019, lot 509
• Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Auction History

Catalogue Note

Executed in 2002, Keep It Real belongs to Banksy’s celebrated series of early stencil paintings exploring authenticity, artistic integrity and the increasingly blurred boundary between art and commerce. Featuring the now-iconic chimpanzee holding a placard inscribed “Keep It Real,” the composition distills one of the artist’s defining philosophies into a single, deceptively simple image. As explored in the main catalogue entry, the work stands as an early manifesto advocating honesty and originality in an art world becoming ever more commercialized.

This example is distinguished by its rich orange background, a colorway that dramatically alters the emotional character of the composition. Warm, vibrant and immediately eye-catching, the saturated orange recalls the visual language of advertising, construction signage and urban graphics. Rather than conveying confrontation, as in the crimson variants, the orange version possesses an infectious energy and optimism. It evokes the bustling visual culture of the modern city, the very environment from which Banksy’s art emerged, while reinforcing the immediacy of the work’s message. Against this luminous backdrop, the stark black-and-white stencil acquires extraordinary clarity, transforming the ape into an instantly recognizable icon.

I use monkeys in my pictures for a lot of reasons, guerrilla tactics, cheeky monkeys, the fact that we share 98.5 per cent of our DNA with them. If I want to say something about people, I use a monkey.

This work also benefits from an exceptional exhibition history. It was included in Banksy – The Unauthorised Retrospective, curated by Steve Lazarides at Sotheby’s S|2 Gallery in London in 2014. As Banksy’s former photographer, publisher and gallerist, Lazarides played a pivotal role in documenting and promoting the artist’s formative years. The exhibition brought together many of Banksy’s most important early works, highlighting the originality and conceptual coherence of his practice at a time when institutional recognition of street art was rapidly expanding.

Combining its vibrant colourway, distinguished provenance and notable exhibition history, this canvas stands among the most compelling examples of the Keep It Real series. It perfectly illustrates Banksy’s remarkable ability to transform a simple slogan into a timeless meditation on authenticity, while demonstrating how subtle variations in color can profoundly influence the emotional resonance of one of his most enduring early compositions.

Unique early canvases such as this occupy a pivotal place within Banksy’s oeuvre. Produced before his international breakthrough and long before the explosive demand for his editions, they document the formative period in which the artist developed the unmistakable visual language that would come to define one of the most influential careers in contemporary art. Today, examples from this series are exceptionally scarce and are regarded among the most desirable unique works from Banksy’s early years.