Banksy’s ‘Crazy Horse’ Car Door Painting Could Fetch $200,000 at Auction
One collector may be clearing space on their wall to hang a car door, as a work by England’s most famous street artist is up for grabs.
Banksy’s original aerosol painting on a car door titled Crazy Horse just listed in Julien’s Auction’s Street Art sale, with a starting bid of $25,000. The work debuted in 2013 as part of a New York City installation, also dubbed “Crazy Horse,” near Ludlow and Stanton in the Lower East Side. Stencil work on the lot depicts stampeding horses about to bear down on a group of terrified people. Now estimated to sell for between $100,000 and $200,000, it comes on a custom display stand with a paint-splattered traffic cone that originally accompanied the work.
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The door is from one of two painted cars seen at the radical outdoor showcase. Visitors were provided a phone number that played audio clips from a 2007 Apache airstrike in Baghdad, in which two Reuters correspondents were reportedly killed. “The Apache helicopter bore the call-sign ‘Crazy Horse 18’ and inspired the title for the artwork,” according to Julien’s website. It was installed on October 9, 2013 as part of Banksy’s N.Y.C. residency named “Better Out Than In.”
Measuring 71 x 40.5 x 30 inches, the Crazy Horse painting is certainly easier to display than the 20-foot-tall seagull mural he left on the side of a U.K. couple’s home in August 2021. Garry and Gokean Coutts discovered the work one morning that would have cost them $49,500 to maintain, according to council officials. But eventually, they hired a firm to remove the work they called a “living nightmare,” last April, which cost them about $247,000.
In early 2023, a Valentine’s Day mural by the artist was partly removed just hours after going on view in the coastal British town of Margate in Kent. It featured a 1950s-style housewife with a swollen, black eye, bruised cheek, and a swollen lower lip standing over a freezer that had a pair of feet sticking out of it—a piece intended to bring attention to the issue of domestic abuse. The freezer Banksy place next to the mural was removed while preservation of the wall art underwent discussion.
Julien’s Auctions Street Art sale will take place on February 15 in Beverly Hills, but online bids are being accepted now.
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