What is the name of the Banksy artwork that sold for £18.6 million in 2021?
Answer
Love is in the Bin
The Banksy artwork that sold for £18.6 million in 2021 was Love Is in the Bin.
The work began as Girl with Balloon, a framed Banksy image offered at Sotheby’s in London on 5 October 2018. Immediately after the hammer fell, a shredder hidden inside the frame activated and sliced the canvas into strips. Only part of the image passed through the mechanism, leaving the girl and the red heart partly intact.
Banksy later authenticated the transformed piece and gave it the new title Love Is in the Bin. The episode blurred the boundary between painting, performance and auction spectacle: the artwork was effectively created in front of bidders. It was subsequently displayed at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart on permanent loan.
On 14 October 2021, Sotheby’s sold Love Is in the Bin for £18,582,000, including the buyer’s premium, setting an auction record for Banksy at the time. A frequent mistake is to answer Girl with Balloon, which was the work’s original title before the shredding intervention, not the name of the altered artwork sold in 2021.