{"id":22434,"date":"2026-05-24T04:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T04:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/22434\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T04:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T04:34:14","slug":"fair-warning-bets-big-on-a-banksy-that-could-realize-18-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/22434\/","title":{"rendered":"Fair Warning Bets Big on a Banksy That Could Realize $18 Million"},"content":{"rendered":"

A landmark Banksy is hitting the auction block via Fair Warning, carrying one of the artist\u2019s loftiest estimates yet.<\/p>\n

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.\u2019s 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\u2013$18 million estimate.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is becoming clear that Banksy is probably one of the most consequential artists of our time,\u201d\u00a0Fair Warning founder Lo\u00efc Gouzer<\/a> said in a phone call. \u201cIt\u2019s hard since within the art world, you\u2019re not supposed to like Banksy because the art world didn\u2019t make him\u2014he\u2019s the only artist who made himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gouzer, a former Christie\u2019s rainmaker who helped lock in the $450 million Salvator Mundi sale, is considered a bit of a market maverick<\/a>. He believes Banksy is on a similar trajectory to Jean-Michel Basquiat. \u201cThat\u2019s why I decided to do it,\u201d he said of this sale. \u201cI tried to find the best painting I could, and this is probably one of the most important Banksys to come to auction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Banksy-modified<\/p>\n

Banksy, Show Me the Monet (2005), on view at Sotheby\u2019s London. Photo: Kirsty O\u2019Connor \/ PA Images via Getty Images.<\/p>\n

A Seminal Banksy Work<\/p>\n

The work emerged from the British street artist\u2019s seminal \u201cCrude Oils\u201d 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

In Girl and Balloon, one of the artist\u2019s 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\u2019s only pop of color. Gouzer called it \u201ca compressed distillation of Banksy in one work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Banksy,<\/p>\n

Banksy, Love Is In The Bin (2018). Courtesy of Sotheby\u2019s<\/p>\n

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<\/a>\u201418 times its estimate\u2014at Sotheby\u2019s London in 2021. (Sale prices include fees, estimates do not.) It remains the artist\u2019s most valuable work sold at auction.<\/p>\n

Banksy\u2019s \u201cCrude Oils\u201d canvases have also performed strongly on the block, with Sunflowers From Petrol Station (2005) realizing $14.5 million at Christie\u2019s New York in 2021 and Show Me the Monet selling for $9.9 million at Sotheby\u2019s London in 2020, according to the Artnet Price Database. Last year, Crude Oil (Vettriano), a 2005 work\u00a0from the collection of Blink-182\u2019s Mark Hoppus, brought in $5.5 million<\/a> at Sotheby\u2019s London.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Banksy, Crude Oil (Vettriano), 2005. Courtesy of Sotheby\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Finding the Right Format<\/p>\n

Selling a work of such significance calls for the perfect setting\u2014hence Fair Warning\u2019s staging of a live auction. It\u2019s a format that the app-based platform has only used twice before, one of which saw Andy Warhol\u2019s 1974 portrait of Brigitte Bardot go for $16.7 million<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s fun when we have a big work,\u201d Gouzer said. \u201cIt\u2019s fun to create something to mark the occasion.\u201d<\/p>\n

This time, ahead of the invite-only auction, the Banksy painting will be displayed at Tiffany\u2019s 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\u2019s right next to Fair Warning\u2019s office. All it took was a call to the firm\u2019s CEO to set things in motion, Gouzer told me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

Jussi Pylkk\u00e4nen auctioned off this Andy Warhol piece for $16.7 million at Fair Warning\u2019s first live auction. Photo: Annie Armstrong.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the kind of instinctive, out-of-the-box thinking that has come to define Fair Warning\u2019s 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<\/a>, still the most valuable artwork to sell on an app. Just recently, it introduced its No Warning<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always like to fuck around. We all have a tendency to be set in our ways,\u201d he explained of his impulse to shake up sales formats. \u201cI like to try things. The Banksy is a good example.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A landmark Banksy is hitting the auction block via Fair Warning, carrying one of the artist\u2019s loftiest estimates…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12775],"tags":[14426,16614,2948,14137,16524,6003,16611,16613,16612,4955,6008,12767],"class_list":["post-22434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tiffany-co","tag-andy-warhol","tag-artnet-news","tag-auctions","tag-banksy","tag-christies","tag-claude-monet","tag-fair-warning","tag-jean-michel-basquiat","tag-loic-gouzer","tag-lvmh","tag-sothebys","tag-tiffany-co"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}