This artwork appeared on 7 August 2024 in east London, on the railway bridge over Brick Lane, as the third in the nine day series of animal pieces Banksy carried out in London that August.

The image is simple and effective: three monkeys hang from the lower girder of the bridge, moving along one after another. It is as if the bridge’s steel had become a branch in a forest, and as if the traffic and brick of east London had become its canopy. The animals are completely carefree; the city passing beneath them is completely indifferent.

The title and the group of three naturally bring to mind the classic “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” idea. But Banksy’s monkeys are not holding those classic poses, they are not covering their eyes, ears or mouths. The artist gave no official statement for any piece in the series, so this connection remains an association the viewer makes, not a meaning the artist declared.

The monkey is one of Banksy’s oldest and most loaded symbols. In 2002’s Monkey Queen, he depicted the Queen as a chimpanzee, bringing the sacredness of the monarchy down to earth in a single move. In 2003’s Laugh Now, a row of monkeys wore signs reading “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge”. His 2009 piece Devolved Parliament, a large oil painting filling the House of Commons with chimpanzees, sold for 9.9 million pounds in 2019, holding the artist’s auction record for a time.

Against that history, the monkeys on Brick Lane look like a much lighter, almost cheerful version of that same political vein. Nobody here is carrying a sign, nobody is sitting in parliament. It is simply three animals swinging beneath a bridge. Perhaps that is exactly the point: at this stage in Banksy’s career, the most radical intervention in the city is to remind it, for a few days, how to play.

Three Monkeys is a fine example of Banksy’s technique of building architecture directly into the composition. The bridge itself is half of the piece; the animals are just a sentence hung onto that structure.