This piece, titled “Original Concept for Barely Legal Poster (After Demi Moore)”, grew out of the promotional image prepared for “Barely Legal”, the Los Angeles exhibition Banksy held in 2006 and one of the turning points of his career. The exhibition ran from 15 to 17 September 2006, and the image was used on posters put up across the city in the days beforehand.

The composition carries a direct reference. It reinterprets the famous photograph Annie Leibovitz took for Vanity Fair magazine in 1991, showing a pregnant Demi Moore nude, an image that became one of the most talked about cover photographs of its time. Moore’s face is covered with the mask of a monkey wearing a wig, wide eyed, smoking a cigarette.

This monkey figure is a device that has become one of Banksy’s signatures. Throughout his career the artist has often turned to the monkey image as a way of conveying a certain character or attitude while hiding his own identity. Here too, the mask can be read both as a comic dislocation and as a move that debases a famous, near sacred image.

The piece no longer exists on the street as a billboard. It exists as a canvas work. According to sources it passed first into a private collection in London, then to the Delahunty Fine Art gallery, and finally to its current owner in 2017. On 25 March 2021, estimated at between two and three million pounds, it found a buyer at Sotheby’s London for a hammer price of 2,677,000 pounds, around 3.67 million dollars.

This is a typical example of Banksy’s approach: taking an iconic image fetishised by the media and reworking it through his own humorous, critical language. It can also be read as an indirect comment on how rarely, and how controversially, the pregnant female body has been represented in art history, since Leibovitz’s original photograph also caused a major controversy when it was published. Banksy brings this controversial image back into view once more, this time filtered through his own humour.