Banksy’s 2005 London exhibition featuring oil paintings based on famous artworks was called Crude Oils.
The exhibition presented Banksy’s interventions into familiar art-historical images. Rather than simply copying canonical paintings, he altered them with modern subjects, dark humour and recurring Banksy-style visual jokes. The title “Crude Oils” works as a pun, referring both to the painting medium and to crude, rough or unsettling subject matter.
Crude Oils is sometimes confused with Banksy’s other London exhibitions, including Turf War and Existencilism. Those shows also involved paintings and stencil-based work, but they were separate exhibitions with different dates and titles.
The event is important because it shows that Banksy’s practice was not limited to anonymous stencils painted directly onto walls. He also reworked gallery formats and the history of fine art, using established images as a framework for satire.