Pull out your party poppers and don your party hats – this week Enter Gallery is (legally) celebrating Number 10, a new piece by Dirty Hans, available exclusively at Enter Gallery now.

In Hans’ signature tongue-in-cheek style, Number 10 is a timely piece, in which he pokes fun at 2022’s Partygate political scandal which, as we all know, involved government staff throwing illicit parties while the rest of the country was in lockdown.  

In today’s blog, we reveal a little more about the piece, and chat to Dirty Hans to see which elements of the piece are his favourite.

Seedy soirees

Dirty Hans is an artist who specialises in high-impact contemporary urban art. His work fuses Pop Art sensibilities and imagery from popular culture to create enjoyable artworks that evoke a sense of time, place, and perfectly capture the zeitgeist.

In the exclusive piece, Hans depicts a lawless Number 10 Downing Street after what appears to be a particularly raucous party. The Prime Minister’s home is plastered in graffiti calling for revolution while referencing problematic politicians past and present.

Of course, there a multiple nods to Covid-19 including doves carrying protective masks and praise for the NHS heroes.   

Pirate politics

Across his humorous oeuvre, it’s clear that Dirty Hans is an artist who greets the world with a smile and is always ready with a wry joke even in the darkest of times. We chatted to him to learn how the piece came about and his favourite elements of the artwork. Hans reveals: 

 

“Number 10 was my reaction to how parliament seem completely incapable of considering what regular people want, and need, from a serving government.”

“This leads to my favourite part of the piece, which is the little kid perching on the doorstep, bricking up the infamous front door to Number 10 with building blocks, ‘power to the people’ spelt out within the bricks.”

“Another of my favourite elements is the inflatable globe with a pirates flag on its - pirates being another reference to those that ‘lead’ the government.”

Repeat motifs
Die-hard fans of Dirty Hans will spot that he has infused the piece with multiple motifs that crop up across his oeuvre.

Number 10 features a number of infamous artworks from Banksy including one of the street artist’s signature rats, as well as Kissing Coppers and Playhouse Foreclosure.  

Also hidden within the print are nods to the monarchy, surveillance culture and anti-war messages.  

Given the level of detail included, each artwork can take between five and six months to produce. Hans tells us that once he has the initial idea, he starts to create a narrative, pinning the print to the wall and slowly adding and removing elements until he gets it right. He tells us: 

“I hope my work makes people smile and that they see new things each time.”

Number 10 is available now, exclusively at Enter Gallery. Get yours here.