A recent Banksy mural, featuring a woman sneezing out her false teeth, has been removed from its original location in Bristol, and will now go to auction.
The artwork, entitled “Aachoo!!”, was first spotted on the side of a semi-detached house in Totterdown on December 10 last year.
Speaking to BBC News, gallery owner John Brandler – who previously purchased one of Banksy’s Nottingham murals for a reported “six-figure sum” – said he was offered the artwork, but told the owner to give it to Bristol.
Now it has been confirmed that Netherlands-based auctioneers Hessink’s will be offering the item for sale at a public auction to be held in the coming weeks.
Waiting for the moment the Achoo #banksy is removed in Bristol @itvwestcountry pic.twitter.com/ahcY9BoZr0
— Charlotte Gay (@CharlotteGay_) March 12, 2021
Banksy
How it started (December 10, 2020) How it's going (March 12, 2021)#streetart #totterdown #bristol pic.twitter.com/NDpneoWFim— Patrick McCurdy (@pmmcc) March 12, 2021
Brandler also said he told the previous owner of the house in Totterdown’s Vale Street, one of the steepest roads in the UK, that it was a “poison chalice”.
“I actually advised the previous owner to give it to the corporation of Bristol or to an art museum,” he said. “My personal view is that I think the house has been sold and the new people have moved in and covered it up.”
The gallery owner previously stated that the artwork should “stay where it is,” and had been “looking at getting a covenant put into the deeds of the house” to keep the Banksy original in its original location.
On Thursday (March 11), Kate Winslet joined calls for Reading Prison to be turned into an arts venue, after a new piece of Banksy artwork was unveiled there last week.
The mural, which emerged last Monday (March 1), shows a prisoner – resembling famous inmate Oscar Wilde – escaping from the prison using a rope fashioned from bedsheets tied to a typewriter. Banksy has subsequently confirmed that the piece was his own creation.
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