“Then we heard an alarm go off,” Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby’s. The work, “Girl With Balloon,” a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby’s “Frieze Week” evening contemporary art sale.

“We want to ask for the relevance of the work in a long-time context, in contrast with the current hype of the art market,” a spokesperson of the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie said.LONDON - The British street artist Banksy pulled off one of his most spectacular pranks on Friday night, when one of his trademark paintings appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby’s in London after selling for $1.4 million at auction. She later loaned the work to the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie, where the half-shredded piece by the legend of Street Art was on view between the gallery’s Old Masters and Modern Art masterpieces. In the end, the woman who had purchased the work agreed to keep the piece in its newly created state, renamed Love is in the Bin by Banksy. By breaking this, its artistic value could be negatively impacted. The frame, it was said, was integral to the work of art and glued to it. While Sotheby’s denied this exact narrative, they did confirm that when asking the artist’s studio about removing the work from the frame during their cataloging process, they were expressly told not to.

First, the painting had to be hung in the salesroom at the time of the sale second, it had to be sold in the second part of the auction proceedings and third, it was not to be removed from the frame at any time. Some people think the auction house were in on it, they weren’t.”Īccording to a source who spoke with Artnet’s Kenny Schachter, someone from Banksy’s publicity team had contacted Sotheby’s to sell Girl with Balloon but came with strict stipulations for how the sale should take place. As stated by Sotheby’s after the fact, this was “the first work in history ever created during a live auction.” Initially, people wondered whether Sotheby’s had been in on the elaborate prank, but Banksy confirmed in a social media post that this was not the case, writing: “Some people think it didn’t really shred. The whole contemporary art world was astonished. As stunned auction-goers looked on and could barely believe what was happening, the moment became “instant art world history”. The bottom half of the painting was cut into strips, but it stopped shredding in time for the heart-shaped balloon to remain visible. In what can be called a quintessential Banksy moment, the moment the hammer slammed down selling Girl with Balloon for $1.4 million, the work of art started to lower itself through a shredder built into the bottom of the frame. In 2018, a 2006 framed copy of the artwork was sold at auction at Sotheby’s.

Originally stenciled on an East-London wall, this now-iconic figure and has been reproduced in many different places, making it one of Banksy’s best-known artworks.

Girl with Balloon depicts a girl reaching up towards a red, heart-shaped balloon. Art or prank? The story of the half-shredded Banksy painting

Banksy balloon girl shred video