Three years ago, Sotheby’s sold Banksy’s Girl With a Balloon for £1 million ($1.4 million) at an evening sale in London. The painting made the headlines as the bottom half of the piece was shredded immediately after the auctioneer’s hammer dropped. Now, the piece is returning to the auction.
Sotheby’s London is auctioning the piece again on October 14 during the house’s contemporary art evening sale. When Girl With a Balloon sold in 2018, it carried a pre-sale estimate of £200,000. Since the viral moment, Banksy’s authentication committee, Pest Control, certified the work under its new title Love is in the Bin (2018), and it now carries an estimate of £4 million–£6 million ($5.5 million–$8.3 million).
The artist has long denied that Sotheby’s was in on the stunt. The auction house reported that the European collector who placed the winning bid for the work in 2018, decided to keep it in its new form.
In a press release, Sotheby’s likened the stunt to Robert Rauschenberg’s famed 1953 work, Erased de Kooning, as part of a tradition of destroying artworks as an artistic statement. In a statement, Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s senior director and chairman of modern and contemporary art, said, “Today this piece is considered heir to a venerated legacy of anti-establishment art that began with Dada and Marcel Duchamp more than a century ago.”
In recent months, Banksy’s market has reached news height. In March, his Game Changer (2020), an ode to NHS healthcare workers in the United Kingdom that depicts a child playing with a toy a nurse, sold for £16.7 million ($22.9 million) at Christie’s, setting a new record for the elusive artist.
Love is in the Bin will go on public display on September 4 in London at Sotheby’s New Bond salesroom and will then travel to Hong Kong, Taipei, and New York before returning to London for the sale.
