Banksy

(British, b. 1975)

Weston Super Mare
1999

Footnotes

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Pest Control Office.

Provenance
Private Collection, UK
Sale: Sotheby's, Olympia, Contemporary Art, 19 June 2006, Lot 560
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Literature
Robin Banksy, Banging your head against a brick wall, London 2001, n.p., illustrated



Banksy's best works always have at their heart his distinctive, often brutal sense of humour. So much of his early work focuses on that peculiarly British characteristic that celebrates the mundane and the ordinary, in the tradition of the kitchen sink painters such as Stanley Spencer of the mid-Twentieth Century. Banksy often plays with this national personality trait, repurposing twee landscapes and inserting shocking images in the Crude Oil series, or, as in the case with the present lot, memorialising a town synonymous with drabness and faded glamour and building the composition on the image of a lonely figure sitting on a bench. The sheer unsuitability of this as a subject for a major work of art is where the humour lies and yet it also gives a glimpse into the personality of this mercurial artist. Weston-Super-Mare is a seaside town near Banksy's native Bristol and the location of his 2015 theme park Dismaland. Best known as the site of the once celebrated Tropicana Lido, closed since 2000, Weston-Super-Mare is not the obvious choice for a new amusement park and so it would have immediately appealed to Banksy's post-modern sense of irony. This is also a political choice; by celebrating the hinterland and indeed the degraded, disenfranchised figure at the heart of the composition of the present lot, Banksy is using his platform to drag focus away from traditional art world contexts. Always a self-confessed outsider, so much of Banksy's art exists to poke fun at traditional hierarchies and, in light of his astonishing success, also at himself. If everyone is fair game for mockery in Banksy's world then no one is more so than he himself and in that sense the figure on the bench can be seen as a self-portrait, revealing his own sense of ordinariness and feeding into the theme of being an imposter that features so often in his work.

Weston Super Mare can therefore be seen as a work of searing honesty and self-revelation; a very personal painting that gives a clear, if very rare, insight into the artist's background and personality. Executed in 1999, this work is one of the earliest and most significant canvases by the artist to come to auction.