BANKSY // Pie Face, 2006

  • Banksy’s 2006 Pie Face clown holds pie in dark setting, merging humour with menace.
    Banksy, Pie Face, 2006.
    Oil on canvas, 50 × 40 cm. Stencilled with the artist’s signature, lower right.
    © Banksy.
    Banksy’s Pie Face is a gleeful act of rebellion from the artist’s Crude Oils series. In this piece, a stately 19th-century gentleman dressed in full military regalia is caught mid-disgrace, the victim of a custard pie hurled straight into his face. The hyper-realistic splatter of cream and tin slices through the painting’s aristocratic solemnity, transforming the portrait into a moment of absurdity. Rendered with both technical finesse and satirical flair, Pie Face fuses slapstick comedy with biting political commentary.
     
    As with much of Banksy’s work, the message is layered. The pie becomes a weapon - mocking class, power, and historical reverence in one well-timed strike. Is the target colonialism? Military pomp? Elitist portraiture? Possibly all three. Pie Face invites viewers to reconsider the authority we grant to ‘high art’ and the figures it immortalises. 
     
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  • “The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.”

    – Banksy

    Part of Banksy’s Crude Oils series, Pie Face reworks a 19th-century style portrait of a military gentleman by inserting a cream pie splattered across his face. The contrast between traditional portraiture and comic interruption delivers both humour and social critique, challenging conventions of art history while mocking authority and power.
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