Panto Horse Guard, 2005
MISSING ORIGINAL
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Unknown
Exhibited
Crude Oils, London, 2003
This iconic Banksy Original features a British royal guard with an outdrawn sword sitting atop of a pantomime horse, rendered in photorealistic painterly style. Banksy often challenges and pokes fun at authority and the police in his artworks, reflected brilliantly in this subversive, colorful painting.
The work belongs to Banksy’s widely celebrated series, the “Crude Oils”. In these hijacked traditional oil paintings, the artist inserts his iconic stencil figures into Old Masters works. In doing so, he tackles relevant issues and formulates sharp social commentary through subversive humor. They’re both a reference to ideas of the “readymade” and artists like Marcel Duchamp, as well as to ideas of Pop Art around mass production and appropriation. Banksy has successfully placed these artworks into exhibitions of respected museums and art galleries around the world, including The Louvre, The Tate, The British Museum and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
