The Banksy picture, “Girl with Balloon” which was half sliced by a shredder concealed in its frame when it was sold for just over a million pounds at a Sotheby’s auction in 2018, has now fetched the royal sum of £18.6 million, more than three times the top end of its £4-6 million price estimate, when it went back under the hammer last month in London.
Alexander Scheuber / HypeArt
Now called “Love is in the Bin”, the work is an auction record for the artist.
“Some people think it didn’t really shred. It did. Some people think the auction house was in on it, they weren’t,” the street artist, whose identity is a closely guarded secret, said on Instagram in 2018.