Street Artist's Half-Shredded 'Girl With Balloon' Painting Expected To Fetch Millions

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) - Banksy's artwork "Love is in the Bin," which famously shredded itself at Sotheby's in London three years ago, has returned to the auction room to be sold.

Onlookers gasped and laughed in October 2018 when the work, then titled "Girl With Balloon," was sucked into a shredder hidden in its frame as the hammer fell on a final bid of $1.38 million, shredding the bottom half of the canvas.

From the rostrum, Oliver Barker, the auctioneer and Sotheby's European chairman, declared it a "brilliant Banksy moment."

"I was taken by complete surprise," he says. "We managed to kind of have a modicum of order, we sold the picture. But then again, of course, almost overnight this picture just became an icon."

Three years later, the painting of a young girl holding a red heart-shaped balloon by the the elusive British street artist is going back under the hammer, renamed "Love is in the Bin," with a price estimate of $5.54 million to $8.31 million.

"It's gone up tremendously, nearly four times, obviously, since that last time. But I think also in the interim, Banksy's market commercially has also grown exponentially," Barker tells Reuters.

A Banksy painting showing a young boy playing with a toy nurse as a superhero rather than Batman or Spider-Man sold for more than $20 million on March 23, setting an auction record for the artist.

"Game Changer," which was unveiled in May 2020 at University Hospital Southampton, paid tribute to the frontline workers of Britain's National Health Service (NHS) in their fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The black-and-white artwork shows a young boy lifting a nurse, her arm stretched and wearing a cape, while traditional superheroes Batman and Spider-Man lie in a bin.

"I think that Banksy's fame now is so ingrained, you know, not only in this country, but I think sort of further afield," Barker says.

"Love is in the Bin" will travel to Hong Kong, Taipei and New York and then return to the British capital for the Oct. 14 auction.