Original Concept for Barely Legal Poster (After Demi Moore), 2006
Spray-paint and emulsion on canvas
213 x 137.5 cm (83 7/8 x 48 1/2 inches)
Unique
Sotheby’s London: 25 March 2021
GBP 2,677,000 / USD 3,670,000
Exhibited
Barely Legal, Los Angeles, 2006
Created in 2006 and used as the poster image for the artist’s landmark LA exhibition in September that year, Original Concept for Barely Legal Poster (After Demi Moore) is Banksy at his most outrageous. Featured on advertisements pasted around the city in the days leading up to the exhibition, this image was the perfect emblem for Banksy’s breakthrough US show: Barely Legal.
Juxtaposed against a blue-sky backdrop of the famous Hollywood sign nestled in the iconic surrounding hills, the Barely Legal poster announced a self-proclaimed “three-day vandalized warehouse extravaganza”. Taking place in one of the US’s most divisive cities – a city where glamour, wealth and celebrity is matched by an equal dose of crime, poverty and homelessness – this hugely ambitious and now legendary exhibition heralded the arrival of Banksy on the global stage.
As the ultimate tongue-in-cheek symbol for his LA show, the present work on canvas takes on one of the most famous and controversial images of Hollywood celebrity: Demi Moore’s iconic 1991 Vanity Fair cover. Featuring the idiosyncratic monkey mask – a disguise associated with Banksy himself and familiar to well-known images of the notoriously anonymous artist – this mischievous and brazen parody utterly encapsulates the daring humor at the heart of the artist’s breakthrough exhibition. Here an iconic image of contemporary celebrity finds subversion and a new purpose at the hands of one of the most important artistic voices of our time; its imagery standing as a perfect symbol for what is considered Banksy’s most significant exhibition to date.
The present work takes its source from a legendary Annie Liebowitz photograph of a nude and heavily pregnant Demi Moore. When it was featured on the front cover of Vanity Fair’s August 1991 issue, this image caused a media sensation worldwide. Its overt depiction of the pregnant female body courted a huge amount of controversy at the time of its release; despite Moore’s modest pose and so-called ‘hand-bra’, the image was deemed indecent and many news outlets wrapped it in paper alongside top shelf-porno magazines. Today it is remembered as one of the most ground-breaking magazine covers of all-time and is considered a milestone image of female embodiment. It enjoys iconic status in the media, having been parodied many times over, not least by Banksy in 2006.
In Banksy’s version, Moore’s face is obscured by a smoking boggle-eyed monkey in a wig. Towering two meters in height and executed in the artist’s signature stencil and spray paint aesthetic, the larger-than-life Original Concept for Barely Legal Poster (After Demi Moore) is a striking image of bare-faced daring and humor. It is an image that both pokes fun at the original and yet flaunts a depiction of the pregnant female body – a conspicuous absence across the canon of Western painting. It skirts a fine line between provocation and indecency: this is Banksy doing what he does best. Used to announce the LA show and advertise Banksy’s website (on which the location of the eagerly anticipated exhibition would eventually be revealed) this is an image that simultaneously serves many purposes: it delivers a supreme expression of the bares-all, no holds-barred, attitude that has won Banksy such popularity; it is a nod to Barely Legal’s host-city, the City of Stars, and a burlesquing of its piousness; it acts as a send-up of traditional representations of pregnancy in art history or lack thereof; and it is an image that presents an established Banksyian trope often used as a playful proxy for the artist’s own notoriously anonymous likeness.
The chimpanzee or monkey is one of the most widely recurring motifs in Banksy’s arsenal. From the earliest Monkey Detonator and famous tabard wearing apes sporting the slogan ‘Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge’, through to works that directly mock the establishment, notably the ambitious dystopian reimagining of the House of Commons run amok with irate chimps (Devolved Parliament, 2009), primates are Banksy’s most frequently called-upon symbol, even when representing himself. Indeed, the first known instance of this self-presentation-as-monkey can be traced back to Self-Portrait of 2000 in which a figure wielding two spray cans is masked by an explosion of yellow paint and the stenciled face of a chimp.
Though Banksy has always fiercely maintained his anonymity, he has posed for a number of tongue-in-cheek photographs in which his face is either obscured or disguised. Indeed, the most habitually used disguise for these is the very same monkey-mask depicted in the present work. The first photographs of Banksy wearing this comical mask date from around 2003 and have since been an indispensable means to conceal identity yet convey something of the artist’s personality as his fame and popularity has grown. In interviews filmed for Banksy’s 2010 documentary ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’, the mask appears under a glass cloche next to the artist whose own face is shrouded in shadow. It was even used in promotional posters for the film wherein a monkey-mask wearing individual, presumably meant to be Banksy, balances a film camera on his shoulder.
In 2011 it appeared yet again in Banksy’s cover feature for London’s Time Out magazine, whose glossy four-page spread included images of the artist, wearing the ubiquitous mask, dressed in the bearskin hat and garb of a Queen’s Guard, holding an extended paint roller. Its usage on so many occasions emphasizes the sardonic tone of Banksy’s role as social commenter. The campy dress-up of Banksy’s Original Concept for Barely Legal Poster (After Demi Moore), which can be read as an image of the artist in drag, serves to lampoon the cult of celebrity that has become so powerful in our contemporary age.
