“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.”
—Banksy

Emphasising the blend of linguistic dexterity and sharp social commentary that the anonymous street artist Banksy has become best known for over the years, Forgive Us Our Trespassing playfully evokes the Christian petition to ‘Forgive us our trespasses’, upending its meaning through the subtle substitution of one word for another.

 

Executed on a large scale and featuring a young child kneeling in prayer before a monumental Gothic stained-glass window with his head bowed towards his hands, the composition draws on the familiar iconography of devotional images, only to undercut this set of visual cues with the addition of contemporary urban clothing and the tools of the graffiti artist's trade by the child's side. His hoodie pulled up over a baseball cap, the child's 'trespassing' here points to the fundamental action of graffiti and street art as a breaking of boundaries - both the physical boundaries of private property that is tagged in the process, and the questioning of societal rules that it often provokes. 

 

 

Those in Glass Houses

 

With its own long and often overlooked history stretching back to the Middle Ages, stained glass represents a fascinating aspect of our shared visual culture, and the role of images in communicating culturally important messages. Used almost exclusively in the decoration of churches and religious buildings before the 19^th century, stained glass proved to be a versatile and valuable material, aiding devotional contemplation in muting the outside world, controlling the flow of light, and illustrating key scenes from the Bible, the lives of the saints or as a means of honouring local guilds and other patrons. Alongside illuminated manuscripts, stained glass represents the only major form of pictorial art to have survived the centuries and emphasises the hugely important role played by visual narratives in communicating important messages embedded in texts that were otherwise illegible to the masses. Given the religious significance of light itself, the effects of the gently shifting and brilliantly coloured patterns filtered through the glass was easily wedded to the ceremonial reverence of the space and its contemplative purpose, a testament to the skill of the artisans who worked on these stunning projects.

 

 

Echoing the shape of Gothic Rose windows, the colourful panels that fill the vaulting frame of Forgive Us Our Trespassing are not the biblical scenes that typically animate stained glass windows, but the looping scrawls and tags of the graffiti artist. Creating his own visual narrative of the history of street art, we can even discern familiar tags including Jean-Michel Basquiat's iconic skull and crown, and graffiti artist Amok's recognisable insignia. Kneeling in prayer before this alternative altar, the young child in the foreground pays homage to this the icons of the past, perhaps even contributing to their legacies. Just as the work of medieval artisansgives us a window into the world in which they were created, Banksy seems to suggest here that the graffiti artist occupies an equivalent position, providing an important social commentary on our own times one for which, perhaps, they deserve to be forgiven.

 

An iconic Banksy image, the figure of the kneeling boy first appeared in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2010 and was used in the same year as one of the key images in the promotion of the artist's film, Exit Through the Gift Shop. Coming to auction for the first time, the present work is one of only two compositions to feature the same pictorial elements, the first having achieved one of the highest prices at auction for the artist when it was sold in 2020. The smaller of the two, the present work was exhibited at Palazzo Cipola, Rome in 2016 and has been on long-term loan to the esteemed MOCO Museum in Barcelona, a testament to its significance, both within the context of Banksy’s practice, and in the broader landscape of contemporary art.  

“Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better-looking place.”
—Banksy

Embodying innocence, hope, and an almost impossible to regain freedom of self-expression, the child is a recurring motif in Banksy’s work, familiar from his most iconic and immediately recognisable images. Drawing on this universal trope, the child is the perfect cipher for Banksy’s antiestablishment message, dramatically juxtaposing individual innocence with institutional corruption, income inequality with corporate greed and pointedly underscoring the uneven distribution of wealth and resources and the devastating human and generational impact of capitalist, neo-imperial economic ideologies played out on a global stage. Frequently referenced as the nation’s favourite artwork, Girl with Balloon is perhaps the most immediately obvious example of the multiple associations attached to the image of childhood while other works deal more directly with issues such as economic equality (Very Little Helps); the human cost of military force (Bomb Hugger, Napalm); government failure (Nola); and the social structures that foreshorten childhood, curbing imagination and play (No Ball Games, Jack and Jill).

In this context, the idea that a child could commit a sin (or a crime) in the act of being creative recasts graffiti and street art in quite a different light, Banksy proving highly adept at invoking certain assumptions, vocabulary, and beliefs in order to turn a mirror onto the hypocrisies and inequalities in our society. An image of the street artist as a child, Forgive Us Our Trespassing emphasises the creativity and expressive freedom that graffiti represents, and the essential role that it plays in contemporary visual culture. 

 

Collector’s Digest

• Emerging from a generation of urban counterculture centred in Bristol in the late 1980s and 90s, Banksy is one of the leading and most provocative street artists of his generation. His stencils are amongst the most instantly recognisable and defining images of contemporary British art, contributing to Banksy being voted the nation’s favourite artist in 2019. 

• One of only two examples to feature the motif of the praying child kneeling in front of a large Gothic window, Forgive Us Our Trespassing was previously on long-term loan to the prestigious MOCO Museum in Barcelona. The image of the youthful and contrite street artist first appeared in Salt Lake City in 2010 before being printed on posters and distributed as a promotional tool for the Oscar-nominated documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop and in London Bridge station in the same year.

• A powerful image that communicates its message directly and clearly, Forgive Us Our Trespassing is one of several images where Banksy evokes the innocence of the child. Ranking amongst his most immediately recognisable images, these works have also consistently achieved the highest prices for the artist at auction.