Two engravings of Andy Warhol were stolen from a Dutch gallery this Friday. The perpetrators of the theft were targeting a complete edition of the 1985 series ‘Reigning Queens’, which included silk-screened portraits of four female monarchs‘Artnet’ reports. The four works (including the two stolen ones) were damaged, as they were torn from their frames because they are too big to carry in your car.
The thieves were caught on security cameras using explosives to open the doors of the MPV gallery in the city of Oisterwijk around 3:05 am on Friday, November 1. According to a local report, many residents of the city reported hearing a loud bang and the handle of the gallery door was thrown 50 meters away.
According to local police, the intruders, after entering the place, took “several works of art.” They fled in a car that has since been recovered. The gallery owner, Mark Peet Visserhas described the theft of “amateur” and has pointed out that the explosives used to enter were “so violent that the entire building was destroyed” and even damaged some neighboring stores. This was confirmed by the police.
Visser said that even the two works that were successfully stolen are undoubtedly “damaged beyond repair, because it is impossible to remove them intact» for the way in which these works were cut from their frames, according to ‘The Guardian’. Local authorities have launched an investigation into the robbery, including forensic evidence from the crime scene and an appeal for witnesses to come forward.
The thieves took the silkscreens of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and Margaret II of Denmark. They failed to steal those of Beatriz from the Netherlands and Ntombi Tfwala, from Eswatini, formerly Swaziland. An edition of this series is exhibited in the Paleis Het Loo of Apeldoorn in the Netherlands. A place that served for centuries as a pleasure, hunting and rest palace for the House of Orange, the Dutch royal dynasty, and which very recently has been converted into a museum. It is one of the last series that the American made before his death in 1987. Two years earlier he conceived and produced ‘Reigning Queens’, a set of sixteen original engravings in which he portrayed the four queens who reigned in the world at that time. .
In a statement posted on Instagram, the gallery described the set of prints as “a twelfth edition of 40 copiesa rare and singular set that has now been lost. Visser has not revealed the value of the works, but apparently planned to sell them at the PAN art fair in Amsterdam. According to the Artnet price database, a similar print of Queen Elizabeth II from the same Warhol series sold for a record of approximately $856,000 at the Heffel Fine auction house in 2022.
“This robbery was clearly commissioned by someone “I wanted to see them tonight with a nice glass of wine at home,” Visser told Dutch news outlet ‘HLN’, adding that the copies were numbered and could not be sold on the open market. «What else can they do with them now? Light the fireplace or something, I have no idea what they are going to do with them.
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