This watercolour is one of de Medici’s ‘big pictures’, each of which has a distinct colour palette. ‘Big Black’ represents the consequences of the greed that she denounced in The Theory of Everything 2005. De Medici made the ‘train wreck waiting to happen’ ahead of the 2007–08 Global Financial Crisis, envisaging the artwork as the capitalist system derailed.

Like many of de Medici’s watercolours, the painting is laden with symbols: for instance, an AR-15 machine gun — discomfortingly referred to as ‘America’s rifle’. Also included is a miniaturised image of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945 to end World War Two. In the artist’s imagining, the missile is being towed by a weevil, a beetle that invades by stealth. The idea of covert acts hiding in plain sight is underscored by the presence of a CCTV camera, a reference to surveillance in our networked age.