A landmark Banksy is hitting the auction block via Fair Warning, carrying one of the artist’s loftiest estimates yet.
On May 20, Girl and Balloon on Found Landscape (2012) will be sold in a rare live auction by the members-only online sales platform at Tiffany & Co.’s flagship store in New York. Consigned by a private collector, the work has never been seen in public before and is tagged with an ambitious $13 million–$18 million estimate.
“It is becoming clear that Banksy is probably one of the most consequential artists of our time,” Fair Warning founder Loïc Gouzer said in a phone call. “It’s hard since within the art world, you’re not supposed to like Banksy because the art world didn’t make him—he’s the only artist who made himself.”
Gouzer, a former Christie’s rainmaker who helped lock in the $450 million Salvator Mundi sale, is considered a bit of a market maverick. He believes Banksy is on a similar trajectory to Jean-Michel Basquiat. “That’s why I decided to do it,” he said of this sale. “I tried to find the best painting I could, and this is probably one of the most important Banksys to come to auction.”
Banksy, Show Me the Monet (2005), on view at Sotheby’s London. Photo: Kirsty O’Connor / PA Images via Getty Images.
A Seminal Banksy Work
The work emerged from the British street artist’s seminal “Crude Oils” series, started in the early 2000s. First unveiled in a small storefront in London, the series saw Banksy disrupting romanticized landscapes, some of them Old Master reproductions, with symbols of present-day decay. For instance, Claude Monet’s famed water lily pond appears derelict, floating with abandoned shopping carts in Show Me the Monet (2005), while a quaint village scene is newly foregrounded by a monkey imbibing petrol in Monkey Poison (2004).
In Girl and Balloon, one of the artist’s most iconic motifs is seen on the bank of a gauzily rendered river with a mountain rising in the distance, the buoyant red balloon providing the vista’s only pop of color. Gouzer called it “a compressed distillation of Banksy in one work.”
Banksy, Love Is In The Bin (2018). Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Since Banksy first stenciled his Girl With Balloon on a London street in 2002, the figure has become central to his visual vernacular. The image, in fact, adorns the infamous Love Is in the Bin (2018), the self-destructed artwork that sold for a record $25.4 million—18 times its estimate—at Sotheby’s London in 2021. (Sale prices include fees, estimates do not.) It remains the artist’s most valuable work sold at auction.
Banksy’s “Crude Oils” canvases have also performed strongly on the block, with Sunflowers From Petrol Station (2005) realizing $14.5 million at Christie’s New York in 2021 and Show Me the Monet selling for $9.9 million at Sotheby’s London in 2020, according to the Artnet Price Database. Last year, Crude Oil (Vettriano), a 2005 work from the collection of Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus, brought in $5.5 million at Sotheby’s London.
Banksy, Crude Oil (Vettriano), 2005. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Finding the Right Format
Selling a work of such significance calls for the perfect setting—hence Fair Warning’s staging of a live auction. It’s a format that the app-based platform has only used twice before, one of which saw Andy Warhol’s 1974 portrait of Brigitte Bardot go for $16.7 million. “It’s fun when we have a big work,” Gouzer said. “It’s fun to create something to mark the occasion.”
This time, ahead of the invite-only auction, the Banksy painting will be displayed at Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue store from May 7, alongside other artworks already in the space, including those by Damien Hirst, Daniel Arsham, and Anna Weyant. Why the venue? Quite simply, it’s right next to Fair Warning’s office. All it took was a call to the firm’s CEO to set things in motion, Gouzer told me.
Jussi Pylkkänen auctioned off this Andy Warhol piece for $16.7 million at Fair Warning’s first live auction. Photo: Annie Armstrong.
It’s the kind of instinctive, out-of-the-box thinking that has come to define Fair Warning’s approach to auctions, which sidestep the conventions of the traditional salesroom. In 2020, the platform notably brokered the $10.8 million sale of a 1982 Basquiat painting, still the most valuable artwork to sell on an app. Just recently, it introduced its No Warning format, which lets collectors bypass the traditional auction model through direct purchases or binding bids. After a successful inaugural sale, Gouzer said more works are being lined up for No Warning, in response to demand.
“I always like to fuck around. We all have a tendency to be set in our ways,” he explained of his impulse to shake up sales formats. “I like to try things. The Banksy is a good example.”