A mammoth chunk of wall featuring a 2013 mural by Banksy has been unveiled in the Winter Garden Gallery at Brookfield Place, a shopping centre and event nexus overlooking the Hudson River in the Battery Park neighbourhood of New York City.
Dubbed Battle To Survive a Broken Heart, the mural features a large-scale image rendered on 7,500-pound section of a warehouse wall that was excised from its original location and is on view at Brookfield Place through 21 May, at which point it will go to auction at Guernsey’s. Banksy created the mural in the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn after the local 59-year-old Vassilios Georgiadis gave some helpful advice to the artist, who was travelling through the area incognito. The artist returned to Georgiadis’s warehouse in the middle of the night to paint a mylar heart balloon. A rival graffiti artist going by Omar NYC defaced the mural shortly thereafter. Bansky circled back to the scene, for the first and only time in his career according to Guernsey’s, to repair and embellish the painted balloon.
Georgiadis passed away from heart disease just a few years after Banksy’s painting entered his life. In his memory, his family will be donating a portion of the auction’s proceeds to the American Heart Association (AHA).
“To me this powerful artwork is more than just street art—it’s a symbol of the millions of lives impacted by heart disease, our nation’s leading cause of death,” Nancy Brown, the chief executive officer of the AHA, said in a statement. “As we continue our diligent and dedicated work to improve health for everyone, everywhere we appreciate the support and generosity of the Georgiadis family. This donation will fund life-saving research, help us advocate for healthier communities and improve patient care.”
The Guernsey’s auction will take place on location at Brookfield Place and online on 21 May. The New York City-based auction house has made a name for itself selling items with pop cultural cache, like objects from the estates of Princess Diana or Elvis Presley.
Despite his elusiveness, Banksy has found his name bandied about in the zeitgeist of late—the impact of a 2018 mural he painted in Port Talbot, South Wales, will be the subject of a play debuting in Cardiff this May, and further insights have been shared by a Metropolitan Museum of Art guard about Bansky’s famous illicit inclusion of his art at the storied museum.
The practice of removing Banksy's public art interventions from view and trying to sell them has typically been frowned upon by Pest Control, the agency that controls the trade in his work. However, in past instances where a charity has been involved—like a work that appeared in a UK hospital in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic and was eventually sold to benefit the NHS—he has given his blessing.