The largest known Banksy painting has been sold for more than eleven million euros. The London auction house Sotheby's quoted the sale price for the work entitled "Devolved Parliament" on its website on Thursday night at around 9.8 million pounds (11.06 million euros). The painting shows the British lower house fully occupied with chimpanzees. There was no information on the buyer who won the contract after a 13-minute bidding contest.
#AuctionUpdate Monkey Business : # Banksy's monumental painting of the House of Commons overrun with parliamentary primates sells to applause at £ 9,879,500 - 9 times its previous record - after a 13 minute bidding battle. pic.twitter.com/5LPR5BlgCH
- Sotheby's (@Sothebys) October 3, 2019The work was created in 2009 for the Bristol City Museum and the exhibition "Banksy vs. Bristol Museum" under the name "Question Time". In 2011, the painting was sold anonymously by Banksy and returned to the museum in early 2019 by its owner on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the painting and the originally planned Brexit event on 29th March, and made available to the public.
The auction value of 4.5 meters wide and 2.8 meters high image estimated Sotheby's before the auction to the equivalent of 1.7 to 2.2 million euros. The previous record price for a work by the British artist was just over one million pounds, which was paid in 2008 for "Keep it Spotless" at an auction in New York.
"Regardless of which side you stand in the Brexit debate, there is no doubt that this work is more relevant today than ever before," said the auction house before the auction. Banksy has distilled the "most complicated political situations of society" into a single image, said Alex Branczik, who is responsible for contemporary European art at Sotheby's.