Trolley Hunters appeared in 2006 in Los Angeles at Banksy’s Barely Legal exhibition. The work was created as a critique of consumerism.

Three Neanderthal hunters, crouched in position, attack shopping trolleys with primitive weapons such as spears and clubs. The trolleys stand in open terrain like a herd of antelopes. The composition is caricatural and ironic: the seriousness of the hunters is distorted by the absurdity of the trolleys.

Banksy inverts primitive hunting instincts with modern consumer objects. By adapting Neanderthal hunting scenes to shopping trolleys, he satirises how capitalism has reduced us from ‘hunters’ to ‘consumers’. The hunters’ weapons mock capitalism’s ‘survival of the fittest’ struggle.

He questions how consumer society has distanced us from our basic instincts; while the hunters hunt trolleys, he criticises our inability to feed ourselves and our dependence on processed food. The empty trolleys symbolise the emptiness of capitalism’s promise of ‘satisfaction’; the work foreshadows panic buying in crises like the pandemic and the fragility of global supply chains.

Banksy says: ‘We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.’

In 2018, a print of Trolley Hunters was stolen from an unauthorised Banksy exhibition in Toronto. On social media many people claimed the thief was Banksy himself.