RAT WITH SCALPEL, 2018

Provenance

• Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 2018

Auction History

Catalogue Note

Executed in 2018, Rat with Scalpel presents one of Banksy’s most enduring protagonists in an unusually expressive form. Standing upright and gripping an oversized scalpel like a weapon, the rat appears alert and defiant, its bandana pulled across its face in the manner of a masked protester. Unlike the precision of Banksy’s familiar sprayed stencils, the figure is rendered in vigorous black oil-stick marks, giving the image the immediacy of a drawing. Against the largely untouched white board, the loose contours, smudges and scattered marks around the rat create a sense of movement while preserving the graphic economy characteristic of Banksy’s visual language.

"They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model."

Rats have occupied a central place in Banksy’s work since the beginning of his career, functioning as surrogates for those who operate unnoticed within the structures of the city. Small, unwanted and forced to survive at its margins, the rat becomes in Banksy’s hands a figure of resistance precisely because of its apparent insignificance. In Rat with Scalpel, that potential is made explicit: the animal is no longer simply observing or disrupting its surroundings but has armed itself with a surgical instrument, an object capable both of precise intervention and of inflicting harm.

The image is closely related to the rat Banksy placed near the Centre Pompidou in Paris in June 2018, during a wider series of interventions across the French capital. The Paris stencil appeared during the fiftieth anniversary year of the May 1968 protests, whose demonstrations, occupations and political upheaval transformed French cultural and political life. Banksy’s masked rat, brandishing its blade beneath the walls of one of France’s most important cultural institutions, connected his longstanding vocabulary of urban resistance with Paris’s own history of revolt. The mural subsequently disappeared after the work was cut from its location in September 2019; French authorities later investigated its theft.

The present work is particularly compelling because Banksy translates that street image into a unique, intimate object without reproducing the visual mechanics of the mural. The rough oil-stick execution retains the urgency of a preliminary drawing, while the personal inscription “Thanks Ben” and direct provenance from the artist give the work a distinctly private character. It brings together two essential strands of Banksy’s practice: the rat as an emblem of unauthorized existence and the act of intervention itself. The scalpel is an especially appropriate instrument for that purpose—not a weapon of indiscriminate destruction, but a tool designed to cut precisely into an existing body and alter it from within.