SALE ENDS, 2006

The original painting later achieved significant recognition, notably selling at auction for over $6 million in Hong Kong.

Barely Legal

Sale Ends is inseparable from Barely Legal, Banksy's landmark 2006 exhibition in Los Angeles: a moment where the artist stepped into the institutional and commercial art world without relinquishing his outsider position. Set within a raw industrial space, the exhibition blended spectacle and critique. A live-painted elephant, installations referencing poverty and excess, and a sharp focus on American consumer culture defined the show. It was theatrical, confrontational, and carefully controlled.

Part of the Barely Legal Set, Sale Ends was originally printed as an edition of 100 unsigned prints and sold at the show for $500. The other prints in the series were Festival, Grannies, Applause, Trolleys and Morons. The print was originally intended to be a run of 500, but only 100 were printed by Modern Multiples, yet they are numbered /500.

This discrepancy between the announced and the actual run is characteristic of the Pictures on Walls and Modern Multiples years, when editions were declared before printing and not always completed. It also explains why examples of the LA edition are numbered against a total that never existed.

A Second Life in 2017

Eleven years later, Banksy reworked the composition for the closing down sale of Pictures on Walls, adding a fifth figure to the group. That reworking was released as Sale Ends (Version 2) in an edition of 500 signed prints — and is documented, together with the full reading of the image, on its own page.