Grannies

BANKSY (B. 1974)

Grannies

numbered '184/500' (lower right)

screenprint in colours on Arches wove paper

22 1/4 x 30 1/8 inches (56.5 × 76.5 cm)

framed: 27 1/2 x 35 inches (70 x 89 cm)

Executed in 2006. This work is number 184 from an edition of 500. Accompanied by a signed and dated Certificate of Authenticity from Pest Control.

Published by Pictures on Walls, London.

Grannies was published in 2006 by Pictures on Walls, the London-based publishing partnership Banksy used across the mid-2000s for his major screenprint editions. The year of its publication was also the year of his Bristol Museum interventions and his Barely Legal exhibition in Los Angeles — the show widely credited with completing his transition from cult underground figure to internationally recognised artist and his permanent entry into the serious secondary market.

The image draws on two of Banksy's most persistent strategies: the subversion of domesticity and the inversion of assumed hierarchies of generation, taste and transgression. PUNKS NOT DEAD references the 1981 LP by The Exploited — a defiant response to the perceived commercial dilution of British punk and one of the defining slogans of the post-Sex Pistols hardcore underground. THUG FOR LIFE draws on American gangster vernacular, most directly associated with Tupac Shakur. Rendered in the quietest possible domestic register, both slogans are reframed: not as belonging to any subculture, but as universal declarations of persistence.