Monday, December 3, 2012

Two Banksy murals removed from Bethlehem wall to Miami gallery

Off the wall: Banksy murals move from West Bank to Miami

Palestinian protest paintings fail to sell on eBay, spend a season in the Hamptons and are now heading for Florida fair

Another version of Stop and Search can still be seen in Bethlehem
Two murals attributed to Banksy, which were originally painted in Bethlehem in 2007 and re-emerged amid controversy in an exhibition at the Keszler Gallery in the Hamptons, near New York, in August 2011, are due to go on show in Miami in December. The removal of the works, Stop and Search and Wet Dog, from the West Bank sparked fierce criticism from some in the trade, who said the murals should have been left in situ and that the galleries involved had no right to take them.
The works, together with Kissing Coppers, around 2005, salvaged from a pub wall in Brighton on the south coast of England, and Out of Bed Rat, 2002, originally painted in Los Angeles, will feature in “Banksy Out of Context” (5-9 December), an exhibition of the British street artist’s murals. The show is part of the debut edition of Context, a contemporary art fair organised by Art Miami. It is being produced in conjunction with Stephan Keszler, the owner of the eponymous gallery, and Robin Barton, the owner of London’s Bankrobber Gallery. They came under fire last year for transporting Stop and Search and Wet Dog from the West Bank to the US. According to Barton, however, they did not take the works directly from their original sites; instead, the murals had been removed around a year after they were painted and left in a stonemason’s yard in Bethlehem before Barton and Keszler bought them.
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