THE MERRIVALE STABLE, 2021

Auction History

Catalogue Note

Created during Banksy’s Great British Spraycation in the summer of 2021, The Merrivale Stable was installed without announcement inside Merrivale Model Village in Great Yarmouth. Banksy adapted an existing miniature stable with his signature red graffiti, the slogan “GO BIG OR GO HOME”, and a small stenciled rat beside a cartwheel. The work was subsequently confirmed as part of the wider series of interventions Banksy produced across the East Anglian coast.

The sculpture is built around a typically Banksian reversal of scale. Inside a world devoted to miniaturization, the command to “go big” becomes deliberately absurd, while the life-sized gesture of graffiti is compressed into a model barely large enough to enter. The tiny rat functions almost as Banksy’s surrogate: an uninvited outsider who infiltrates an orderly environment and quietly rewrites its meaning. What had been a charming piece of model-village scenery becomes a genuine act of street art—except that the “street” is only a few centimeters wide.

The work also carries an affectionate humor suited to its seaside setting. Rather than imposing a monumental mural upon the landscape, Banksy adjusted his intervention to the proportions and theatrical logic of the site. Its later sale for GBP 800,000 (Hammer) demonstrated the extraordinary transformation produced by authorship and context: a modest model stable became a seven-figure artwork, while the slogan painted across it proved unexpectedly prophetic.