Rarely Seen Banksy Mural Preserved on a 7,500-Pound Section of a Warehouse’s Wall Goes on Display in New York
“Battle to Survive a Broken Heart” features a red heart-shaped balloon covered with bandages. After spending a decade in storage, the artwork will head to auction on May 21
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In the fall of 2013, a contractor named Vassilios Georgiadis was smoking outside his warehouse in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood. When he noticed a van parked on the street, Georgiadis advised the driver to move to the warehouse driveway, where he wouldn’t risk being hit by passing trucks.
The driver turned out to be Banksy, the mysterious graffiti artist famous for murals like Rage, the Flower Thrower and Girl With Balloon. The next day, a painting appeared on Georgiadis’ warehouse wall: It featured a red, heart-shaped balloon covered in band-aids. The Georgiadis family later cut the mural out of the wall and placed it in storage.
Now, ten years later, the artwork is heading to auction. Ahead of the sale at Guernsey’s on May 21, Battle to Survive a Broken Heart will be on public display at Brookfield Place, a shopping center in Manhattan.
When the mural first appeared on the wall, “I had heard about Banksy,” Georgiadis’ son, Anastasios, tells the New York Times’ James Barron. “I heard he was going around putting up pieces all around the city.”
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When Banksy painted the mural in 2013, he was working on a project called “Better Out Than In” throughout New York. Anastasios recalls that he had recently applied a fresh coat of paint to the warehouse wall. “I guess he saw an opportunity,” he adds.
Crowds gathered at Banksy’s new installation, and other street artists saw their own opportunities: Several graffiti artists, including one known as “Omar NYC,” painted their own tags next to the mural.
“There were so many people, I put Plexiglas over it,” Anastasios tells the Times. “Someone tried to smash it with a sledgehammer. It was a neighbor of ours. He didn’t like the commotion, how everybody was there taking pictures.”
Banksy took note of the reaction and later returned to the site of his mural, where he made several additions: Under Omar NYC’s tag, Banksy wrote “is a jealous little girl,” as Anastasios tells Hyperallergic’s Isa Farfan. According to a statement from Brookfield Place, this incident is the “only time [Banksy] has ever been known to rework his art” (though the artist has modified his creations in other ways).
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The proceeds from the auction will be divided between the Georgiadis family and the American Heart Association in honor of Vassilos Georgiadis, who died of a heart attack in 2021.
“The fact that Banksy created this heart-shaped balloon, complete with bandages, was almost a vision of, unfortunately, what was to come,” Arlan Ettinger, Guernsey’s president, tells Hyperallergic.
The Georgiadis family will donate 10 percent of the proceeds if the artwork sells for less than $1 million, according to Hyperallergic. However, if it fetches more than $1 million, they will donate 40 percent of the total. Ettinger hopes recent high-profile sales of Banksy artworks will drive up the price.
The balloon painting is on a nine-foot-long section of wall, which weighs about 7,500 pounds. An audio guide from banksy.co.uk describes the artwork as “an uplifting visual poem to that most fragile of human emotions that seem to move within us as if on a soft breeze,” per the statement.
