This artwork, made in 2000, is a spray paint on canvas work that carries Banksy’s characteristic stencil signature.

The composition shows two monkeys in symmetrical poses, each pointing a gun at the other. This mirror-image stance stresses how pointless and how cyclical violence can become.

The piece belongs to the “monkey series” Banksy has returned to often throughout his career, sitting alongside works such as “Laugh Now”, “Monkey Parliament” and “Keep It Real”, in which primates are used as a metaphor for human society.

The basic idea is this: beneath the thin veneer of civilisation, human behaviour often stays primitive. By using monkeys instead of people, Banksy strips the scene of any political, national or ideological identity, suggesting that violence belongs not to one particular side, but to a universal human tendency.

Monkey Guns illustrates one of Banksy’s most frequently used strategies: restaging human conflicts through animal figures, which forces the viewer to look at the violence itself, away from any argument over who is right and who is wrong.