The famous partly shredded painting by the British artist Banksy has been auctioned in London for 18.6 million pounds (almost 22 million euros). Auction house Sotheby’s speaks of a record on Twitter. The expected yield was between 4 and 6 million pounds.
Spectators were shocked when the Girl with Balloon artwork, shortly after it was sold at an auction in October 2018, was partially shredded live in front of the public through a shredder built into the painting’s frame. Just before that, the buyer had paid 1,045,000 British pounds (1.23 million euros) for the piece.
The work was subsequently renamed Love is in the Bin and was put up for sale again today. The artwork was expected to fetch many times what the buyer had paid for it at the time, but the final bid of over £18million exceeded expectations. “I’m afraid to drop this hammer,” joked the auctioneer, fearing the painting might hold more surprises. Luckily they didn’t.
“Some people think it wasn’t really shredded. It did. Some people think the auction house was involved, it wasn’t,” Banksy, whose identity is a closely guarded secret, wrote on Instagram in 2018.
The name of the buyer has not been disclosed.
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