The Wikicollecting Top 10 Most Expensive Banksy Artworks

In April 2007 the record price for a Banksy work was broken during a Bonhams auction in London. The work was ‘Space Girl and Bird’, featuring a small girl dressed in a Parka jacket and a deep-sea diving helmet holding a small yellow bird.

The image had originally been commissioned as part of the cover artwork for the 2003 Blur album ‘Think Tank’, and sold for a then-record price of £288,000.

Banksy’s style of ‘corrupting’ existing traditional paintings brought him another record sale in October 2007, at a Sotheby’s sale in London.

His work ‘The Rude Lord’ features a version of a 1776 portrait by the English painter Thomas Beach, altered to include a hand casually raising a middle digit. It sold for a price of £322,900.

The second of Banksy’s sculpture’s ton appear on the list is perhaps one of his most famous. ‘Vandalised Phone Box’ features a traditional red phone box, lying contorted with pain, bleeding and impaled with a pick axe.

Just one of a number of works by the artist to feature iconic red phone boxes in various states of distress, the sculpture sold during the RED charity auction in New York in December 2008 for a price of $605,000.

In February 2008 the five-part oil-on-canvas work ‘Simple Intelligence Testing’ broke the sales record for the artist’s work when it reached £636,500 at a Sotheby’s sale in London.

The piece features a chimpanzee subjected to an intelligence test to find bananas in safes, which quickly uses its initiative to stack the safes and escape through an air vent above.

The most expensive Banksy work ever sold is in fact a corruption of a piece by one of Britain’s most controversial contemporary artists, Damien Hirst.

Keep It Spotless features one of Hirst’s famous ‘spot’ paintings, adapted by Banksy to feature the maid sweeping up which first appeared on his ‘Sweeping it Under the Carpet’ mural in Camden. The maid, a portrait of a Los Angeles hotel maid named Leanne, appears on the work pulling up Hirst’s piece to expose a brick wall behind it.

The work was sold during a Sotheby's Charity auction in New York in December 2008 for a record price of $1.87 million.