My Wife Hates It When I Work From Home

In My Wife Hates It When I Work From Home, Banksy adapts his signature street art style to the domestic sphere in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown restrictions. The elusive anonymous artist posted his pandemic-inspired work on Instagram in April 2020, with the caption: “My wife hates it when I work from home.” Deprived of the public canvas he usually relies on, Banksy uses his own bathroom as a surface for a chaotic scene of nine stencilled rats. His images show rats knocking the bathroom mirror to one side, swinging on a towel ring, urinating all over the toilet lid, unravelling a toilet roll, spraying soap from a shelf, and stepping on a tube of toothpaste. Another, seen in the mirror’s reflection, is seemingly etching into the wall with red marks the number of days they have been under lockdown. Each rat is carefully rendered in grayscale tones, interacting with real bathroom objects like towel rings, soap dispensers, mirrors, and toilet rolls. Banksy creates a layered installation that blurs the line between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space.

Made during the height of the first UK lockdown, the work encapsulates the surreal atmosphere of the time. It offers commentary on isolation and confinement, while relocating the subversive aspect of street art into the private sphere—Banksy is acknowledging a fundamental shift in the relationship between artist, audience, and space during the pandemic. While much of Banksy’s works critique systems of power, capitalism, and surveillance, My Wife Hates It When I Work From Home documents the unprecedented lockdown experience on a more individual and domestic level. The piece challenges the conventional notion of street art and blurs boundaries between public and private, and effectively expresses both a personal frustration and a global experience.