Art News: Banksy's Keep Ou T Sells for £1.6 Million, Grannies Unsold

Three works by Banksy were offered in London's evening sales on Thursday 15 October, with estimates adding up to between £3.1 million and £4.4 million. One sold. Keep Ou T made £1,612,500 with fees at Phillips, within its estimate of £1.2 million to £1.8 million, while Grannies at Sotheby's and Laugh Now at Bonhams went unsold, according to the published results.

Keep Ou T at Phillips

Keep Ou T is a gate from the EU arrivals hall at Heathrow, with KEEP OU painted across its shutter and one of Banksy's rats holding the missing T. He made it in 2019, after the Brexit referendum, and it was first shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition that year. This was its first time at auction. With Gerhard Richter's Mathis of 1983, it led Phillips' Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, which made £14.8 million with all 20 of its lots sold. Our preview of the sale explains why a result like this says little about the value of a print.

Grannies at Sotheby's

Grannies, estimated at £1.5 million to £2 million, is the original canvas of an image Banksy made for Barely Legal, his 2006 exhibition in Los Angeles: two old women in armchairs, knitting the slogans Punk's Not Dead and Thug for Life. Reports of Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Auction list Banksy among the works that went unsold, in a sale that made £46.1 million with fees, led by an untitled 1977 Willem de Kooning at £9.8 million.

Banksy, Grannies, 2006, screenprint, the edition of the same image.

Laugh Now at Bonhams

At 4pm, before either of the other sales, Bonhams offered Laugh Now, a painting of 2001 in acrylic and spray paint, 91.5 cm square, of a stooping chimpanzee wearing a sandwich board. It came from the owner who bought it from the artist that year and carried an estimate of £400,000 to £600,000. Bonhams' published results give no price for it, so it appears not to have sold.

Banksy, Laugh Now, 2003, screenprint. The painting offered at Bonhams is an earlier canvas of the same image.

What it means

An unsold lot is not a verdict on the image. Estimates are agreed months before a sale, and a work that fails in the room can still be sold privately afterwards. What sold on Thursday was a single, well-known work with a clear history, coming to auction for the first time.

For prints, little changes. A screenprint is priced off what the same image, in the same edition and condition, has made recently, and our Banksy price guide sets out those figures. Selling a Banksy compares auction, private sale and outright purchase.

If you own a Banksy and are thinking of selling, send us photographs for a free valuation. There is no obligation to sell, and we act for you rather than for the saleroom.

Cover: Banksy, Grannies, 2006, screenprint.