BANKSY (b. 1974)
Subject to Availability, 2011
Oil and spray paint on canvas in an artist’s frame
50×91 cm (19 5/8 x 35 7/8 inches)
Signed Banksy (on the edge of the frame)
Provenance
Lazarides Ltd, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Exhibition History
Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Art in the Streets, April – August 2011
Auction History
Sotheby’s Diriyah: 8 February 2025
Estimated: USD 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD 1,200,000
Subject to Availability | Origins | 2025 | Sotheby’s
An outstanding example of Banksy’s celebrated series of Vandalized Oil paintings, Subject to Availability reflects the artist’s career-long practice of infusing his works with satire to both subvert the fine art establishment and comment on many of today’s most pressing sociopolitical issues. Atop a serene Hudson River School painting of a pastoral landscape dotted with pine trees leading into snowcapped mountains above, Banksy inserts an asterisk near the top of the mountain, captioning the work “*Subject to availability for a limited period only.” In the spirit of many of the members of the Hudson River School, Banksy wittily remarks that these very mountaintops that were once so revered are now at risk of extinction, their snowy peaks and lush surroundings diminishing as we push our natural world to the brink.
Born and raised in Bristol, England, Banksy has achieved a mythical status that teeters between acclaim and notoriety for his distinctive style of satirical street art and graffiti. His work is rich in dark humor and frequently captioned with subversive epigrams that provide commentaries on socio-political aspects of contemporary life. Seeking to disrupt the status-quo through his anti-establishmentarian practice, Banksy has epitomised his own mission saying: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Regularly upending the norms of the art world while maintaining a decidedly outsider presence as an anonymous artist, Banksy’s practice operates on the edge of fine and street art, often integrating the two as one. Banksy’s initial forays into the fine art world began with the exhibition of his Crude Oils series in 2005, paintings that “re-mixed” masterpieces like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and Vincent Van Gogh’s sunflowers with dark, often surreal elements. Banksy would later expand upon these appropriations in his Vandalized Oils series, of which the present work is part of, taking generic landscapes fashioned by other artists and subtly infusing them with social commentary.
Albert Bierstadt, Mount Corcoran, c. 1876-1877, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Image © Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund / Bridgeman Images
Global neglect of our natural surroundings has long been a source of concern to Banksy, whose work often comments on pressing contemporary sociopolitical issues including police brutality, anti-war activism and the global refugee crisis. At the end of the The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference that failed to reach an agreement, Banksy painted the words “I don’t believe in global warming” sinking into the water of Regent’s Canal in London, a reference at climate change skeptics’ willingness to deny environmental changes despite seeing them in front of their eyes. Most recently, in May of 2024, Banksy unveiled a mural in North London’s Finsbury Park directly behind a tree that had been heavily pruned by the city just as the Spring season was beginning. Behind the tree, Banksy spray painted a person who is themself seemingly spray painting green back onto the tree’s limbs to replace its lost leaves, commenting on the artificial steps mankind has begun to take to feign a kind of normalcy even in a world where our environment is gradually degrading to the point of no return.
Subject to Availability extends this tradition into the gallery space, connecting a phrase typically associated with consumerism to the natural surroundings that have been impeded by this same capitalist-driven society. While from a distance, the painting solely appears as a generic and idyllic landscape, a discerning eye immediately captures the text emblazoned on the work as a built-in caption, a phrase typically used for cheap, tradeable goods and promotions that has been refashioned, much like the painting itself, to imply nature’s own slow demise. While nature is seen in the painting laden with a Romantic grandiosity typical of the late 19th and early 20th century and mankind’s interpretation of our natural surroundings at the time, it has now been diminished to nothing more than an expiring asset.
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Art © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp
Further solidifying Subject to Availability’s importance within Banksy’s oeuvre, the painting was featured in the seminal 2011 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles Art in the Streets, the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art. The exhibition, curated by former MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, sought to trace the development of the long-overlooked movement from its inception in the 1970s to its present iterations, and would end up heavily contributing to a global reappraisal of street art as a legitimate art form in and of itself. Banksy’s involvement in the show was especially significant, as he made a special arrangement with the museum for his crew to work late at night with the security cameras shut off after everyone else had left the building. Banksy then created a new show within his previous installation, disrupting what had previously been seen by museumgoers by not only moving his sculptures around but by also installing new works onto the walls, one of which included the present work. The subversive gag at the heart of the Vandalised Oils series is that these gilt-framed works might hang in a museum or esteemed private gallery and pass unnoticed to the unobservant spectator. Indeed, Banksy’s history of intervention in the scared space of the museum in this manner extends back to his early 2000s pranks at institutions like the Tate Britain in London, where he entered in disguise and hung his own artwork alongside nineteenth-century paintings, managing to keep his work undetected for hours. Later, in 2004, Banksy installed a “vandalised” version of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in a gag that similarly disrupted the institutionalized space and the museum’s most iconic work. Subject to Availability thus serves as the natural apotheosis of this impulse to disrupt this space that is so often bogged down by bureaucracy and the rules of its governing body, finally receiving permission to do so from the museum and turning himself into the curator who has free reign to install his work as he wishes.
The present work shown at right in the second iteration of Banksy’s installation in Art in the Streets, MoCA, Los Angeles, 2011
Images © designboom
Banksy’s “vandalization” of another artist’s work also refers to a deep art historical lineage of artists’ reframing the work of their forebears, especially as can be seen in the Dadaist work of Marcel Duchamp and his infamous 1919 work L.H.O.O.Q, for which Duchamp drew a moustache and goatee on a cheap postcard reproduction of the world’s most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. One might also recall Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, consisting of a work Rauschenberg took from the artist and then erased, reframing it as his own and putting to question the boundaries of what constitutes an artwork and who has ultimate authorship over one. The Vandalised Oils also take precedent from Asger Jorn’s tactic of detournement, for which a pre-existing image was subverted through the insertion of a new dissonant element. The most apposite example for Banksy’s work is Jorn’s series of ‘modification’ paintings; overpainted pictures originally bought in junk shops, many of which now reside in prestigious museum collections worldwide.
In the same way that Banksy “vandalizes” public spaces by graffiting them with his work, Subject to Availability sees the artist using the same precedent on the painted image, forcing audiences to reckon with how they have sought to both safeguard and build up the manmade world while the natural one continues to suffer at its expense. A masterful combination of social commentary, art historical precedent, and satire, Subject to Availability represents the unique opportunity of acquiring a work that combines so many of the pioneering facets of Banksy’s practice that have made the artist as infamous as he is today.
