Everyday Life - Follow your Dreams | UNIQUE Mixed Media on paper, 2024
Mr Brainwash

Mr. Brainwash Everyday Life – Follow your Dreams short EDL or F.Y.D. is an original mixed media work on paper with screen printing, stencil, acrylic painting, collage and spray paint. A unique piece of art with the theme “Follow Your Dreams" proclaimed by a monkey on a Coca Cola crate. Mr. Brainwash's signature can be found on the front and on the back with a dollar bill serial number.

Monkeys, and chimpanzees in particular, have always found their way onto paintings in art there is even a scientific paper on the subject. This is probably why the mischievously smiling monkey is one of the most sought-after motifs of the street art artist Mr. Brainwash.

Chimpanzees and especially the Banksy monkeys have become an instantly recognisable motif in the graffiti writer's oeuvre.

From „Laugh Now“ to Banksy „Monkeys in parliament“, the recurring motif has served as a rhetorical device, allowing to carry out activism and make astute political commentary.

Why monkey artworks?

On the one hand, their small size mean that monkeys are easily reproducible on the street. Simple to paint quickly, the humble ape has allowed street artists to avoid detection and worse – arrest by the police.

Secondly, and more importantly, however: monkeys are the perfect way for artists to communicate his scathing satires of humanity, and the diverse social and political mores for which they see it directly responsible.

Picturing a downcast chimpanzee wearing a sandwich board, these Banksy monkeys bear the anarchic title and slogan, “Laugh Now, but one day we'll be in charge." Despite his expression, Banksy's monkey is a defiant representative of society's 'underdogs', who offers us the hopeful message that the oppressive reality of society will someday come to justice.

As recent political events in the United Kingdom and beyond only confirm, the iconic Laugh Now monkey has proved somewhat prophetic.

As we have seen, artits use monkeys to make political points from all angles; they are not always a symbol of the political establishments slovenliness, as in Devolved Parliament, though that is often the final takeaway message. Monkeys are, in artworks, at times an allegation of humanity as backwards, unevolved, and at times, a reminder of our proximity to those 'below' us on the ladder—whether that is in relation to class, or our actual treatment of animals.

Above all else, monkeys are an instantly recognisable signature of street art's oeuvre.

Referencing Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which proved that humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, the Banksy Monkey is proof of his sardonic wit and erudite treatment of contemporary culture.

Mr. Brainwash's uniformly subversive style fuses historical pop imagery and contemporary cultural iconography to create his own pop art – a graffiti hybrid. The development of this style has catapulted Mr. Brainwash to international fame. Mr. Brainwash's first solo exhibition, Life is Beautiful, was held in Los Angeles in June 2008 and featured over 100 works of art. In addition to Mr. Brainwash's widely recognized iconic art paintings, Life is Beautiful featured larger-than-life art installations, including a 20-foot robot made from old televisions and a life-size replica of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and a pyramid made from 20,000 books. Originally scheduled to open for only two weeks, the art exhibit was extended for three months and attracted more than 30,000 visitors.

Hardly any other street artist has experienced a comparably rapid rise as the Frenchman Thierry Guetta aka Mr. Brainwash, born in 1966 in Garges-lès-Gonesse. His path to becoming the most successful artist of recent years is closely linked to the name Banksy and his Oscar-winning film “Exit Through the Gift Shop." In this documentary, Banksy encourages Guetta, who was still unknown at the time, to become active as an artist himself under the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash. The rumor therefore persists that Mr. Brainwash is a purely fictitious person invented by Banksy and that his works are actually created by Banksy. Everyday Life – Follow your Dreams with the chimpanzee on the Coca-Cola crate, an old vintage cooler that casually holds the spray bottle in his hand to spray his leitmotif “Follow your Dreams" on the wall embodies the street artist as Marilyn for Andy Warhol became the recognition mark. So Thierry Guetta also refers to it because the spray bottle looks like the famous Campbells soup cans when you look closely. On almost every one of his unique pieces, symbols of Keith Haring or Marvel Comics can also be seen in the background.