WOMAN IN A GAS MASK

Domestic Life Meets War

Woman in a Gas Mask appeared in Hostomel in November 2022 as one of seven murals created by Banksy during his intervention in war-torn Ukraine. The work depicts a woman dressed in a bathrobe, her hair set in curlers, standing on a chair while wearing a gas mask and holding a fire extinguisher.

The image brings together two radically different worlds. The bathrobe and curlers evoke the private rituals of everyday domestic life, while the gas mask and extinguisher belong to a state of emergency. Banksy does not depict soldiers or combat, but instead the surreal adjustments imposed upon civilians when war enters the ordinary spaces of daily existence.

The Building as Part of the Image

As with several works from Banksy's Ukraine campaign, the surrounding architecture is essential to the composition. The figure was positioned beside a blackened window on a residential building damaged during the fighting in Hostomel. The real traces of destruction effectively complete the stencil: the extinguisher in the woman's hand responds directly to the scorched wall beside her.

Banksy also incorporated a discarded chair into the work, positioning the stencil so that the woman appears to stand upon it. Painted figure, found object and damaged architecture consequently occupy the same visual space. The building is no longer simply the support for the artwork; it becomes part of the artwork itself.

An Attempted Theft

Only weeks after the mural appeared, on 2 December 2022, a group attempted to remove it by cutting the section of wall carrying the stencil from the building. Ukrainian authorities intervened and recovered the detached work, which was reported to have remained undamaged. Eight people were subsequently identified in connection with the incident.

The attempted removal highlighted the unusual status Banksy's Ukrainian murals had acquired almost immediately after their creation. Painted anonymously on buildings scarred by war, they rapidly became objects considered worthy of protection as part of Ukraine's cultural heritage.

A Work Removed from Its Context

The incident also raises a question that has followed Banksy's street practice throughout his career: what remains of a site-specific work once it is separated from the place for which it was conceived? In Woman in a Gas Mask, the scorched window, damaged building and abandoned chair were integral to the original composition. Removing the stencil preserves its physical image, but inevitably alters the artwork Banksy created in Hostomel.

Like the other murals from Banksy's Ukraine campaign, Woman in a Gas Mask ultimately derives much of its power from this relationship between image and place. Its subject is not war in the abstract, but the intrusion of war into ordinary life—and the extraordinary ways in which ordinary life continues within it.