Banksyliation

»Review«

In this (art) world, Delacroix and Banksy collide. “Banksyliation” takes as its starting point an entirely plausible “alternative” reading of Delacroix’s “La liberté guidant le peuple” (1830). Rather than the conventional interpretation—that the painting addresses the price of freedom, that liberty cannot be won without sacrifice—this work adopts a darker, linguistic (and therefore, logically, visual) approach: Freedom literally walks over corpses. This is where Banksy’s “Flower Thrower” enters the picture. By replacing “Marianne,” the figure of “Liberté,” with the “Flower Thrower,” Delacroix’s nearly two-hundred-year-old masterpiece gains a new dimension—one that opens up fresh interpretations of how freedom is won, against the backdrop of the original work’s fusion of allegory and documentary realism.