Climate protesters tried to vandalise an Andy Warhol painting in the National Gallery of Australia this morning.

The incident follows similar outrages around the world on famous artworks, including da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.

Stop Fossil Fuel Subsidies, an environmentalist activist group, released videos showing two middle-aged women spraying the glass covering Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup I (1968) with children’s paint, then glueing their hands to the frames.

“We’re in a climate emergency,” one shouted.

The women were apparently removed before the glue could set.

It is understood the paintings themselves were under glass frames and not damaged.

The NGA said the prized modern artwork was not damaged. It is now back on display.

In a statement, the group described the activists as “two brave concerned Australians”. The act, they claimed, was “carefully planned so as to be non-violent and to cause no damage or harm”. They denied their act was vandalism.

In a statement on Facebook, the group claimed it was “highlighting the dangers of capitalism by glueing onto Andy Warhol Art depicting consumerism gone mad”.

“And now we have capitalism gone mad,” said one of the women involved in the protest, Bonnie Cassen, a self-styled ‘Earth warrior [and] climate activist’, and editor of the New Bush Telegraph.

Stop Fossil Fuel Subsidies describes itself as “a group of ordinary concerned citizens aware of the severity of the climate crisis”, using non-violent civil resistance to force the government to listen. It is part of a global civil resistance network known as A22.

They demand that all levels of government stop subsidies to fossil fuel companies.

“While Australians struggle to pay power bills, afford housing, and choose between food or medication, our Government pays $22,000 a minute, $11.6 billion [in the last year] to subsidise the fossil fuel industry,” the group wrote on Facebook. “This must stop now.”

“StopFFS and other concerned groups around the globe are stepping up and risking much to do whatever it non-violently takes to get the message out and force governments to come to the table and start to take their duty of care to us, the people who voted them in to protect us seriously,” a spokesperson said. “When normal channels are blocked or ignored, we must get the message out through less than ordinary methods.”

The group’s campaign began last week when a woman glued herself to an exhibition about suffragettes at Parliament House. The woman has been banned from Parliament House for a year.

ACT Policing responded to the incident at the Gallery around 11.15am. They said that as of 1.15pm, no arrests were made. Anyone who witnesses suspicious activity in the Parliamentary Triangle should call ACT Policing Operations on 131 444.

The NGA said in a statement: “A protest has taken place at the National Gallery of Australia following similar incidents elsewhere in Australia and overseas.

“The National Gallery does not wish to promote these actions and has no further comment.”

Extinction Rebellion (XR) ACT expressed its “solidarity” with Stop Fossil Fuel Subsidies. Last year, XR ACT defaced the John Gorton Building, and spray-painted climate change slogans outside Parliament House and the Lodge. Last month, XR members glued themselves to a Picasso in Melbourne, while on the weekend, Spanish members glued their hands to a Goya.

Vandalising artworks is extremists’ latest tactic to protest against climate change. In May, a madman in drag smeared cake on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, shouting that “people are destroying the Earth”. Just Stop Oil climate protesters in London glued themselves to da Vinci’s Last Supper and to Constable’s Hay Wain in July, and threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers last month. (Just Stop Oil is funded by Aileen Getty, the granddaughter of oil billionaire Jean Paul Getty.) to Also in July, Ultima Generazione activists glued themselves to Botticelli’s Primavera in the Uffizi, while Letzte Generation threw mashed potatoes at Monet’s Meules in Potsdam last month. Last week, an activist glued his head to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in the Hague.

Andy Warhol has been targeted before; in 1968, radical feminist Valerie Solanas shot the artist. Solanas was the author of the SCUM Manifesto, which called for women to overthrow the government, end capitalism, and eliminate the male sex.

• With AAP.