UNTITLED (BLOODHOUNDS), 1998

Catalogue Note

The Chase

One of Banksy's earliest known portable works, Bloodhounds reduces a scene of pursuit to a remarkably economical sequence of black silhouettes. Three figures run across the board while, ahead of them, another struggles to restrain a pack of bloodhounds pulling violently forward. There is no landscape, destination or explanation. Everything is movement: bodies leaning forward, legs extended, leads stretched tight and dogs racing toward something—or someone—outside the picture.

The imagery already contains themes that would become central to Banksy's work: pursuit, authority, surveillance and the individual confronted by organized power. Yet there is also humour in the exaggerated choreography. The men appear almost dragged along by the machinery of the chase itself, while the dogs possess considerably more urgency than their handlers.

An Image Borrowed and Rewritten

Research into Banksy's early work has identified an especially interesting source for the composition. The image derives from the logo of the French hip-hop label Hostile Records, which depicted armed pursuers and dogs. Banksy simplified and transformed the source, removing the guns and reducing the number of figures. This early act of visual appropriation anticipates a method he would use throughout his career: take an existing image, remove or alter a few elements, and allow the new context to change its meaning.

Banksy subsequently used the stencil on Bristol walls, sometimes accompanying it with a paraphrase of a remark attributed to film director David Puttnam: “Nowhere will you find the statue of a critic or the biography of a committee.” Contemporary documentation places this combination in Bristol by April 2000. The juxtaposition shifts the pursuit toward a broader attack on conformity and those who judge rather than create.

Bloodhounds is particularly compelling because almost everything associated with the later Banksy is already present in miniature: stencil, appropriation, black humour, anti-authoritarianism and an image designed to communicate instantly. Even its original reported price—£10—captures how far Banksy's work was then from the market that would eventually surround it.

Before Banksy became one of the world's most pursued artists, he was already painting the chase.