Section:GDN 1N PaGe:5 Edition Date:190831 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/8/2019 18:09 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
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News
Volvo lorry could sell
for £1.5m thanks to
Banksy paintwork
Mark Brown
Arts correspondent
Among the gleaming Bugattis, Aston
Martins and Porsches at one of the UK’s
premier car auctions next month will
be a 17-ton lorry with a price tag to
match them all.
Bonhams has announced it is selling
what can arguably be called Banksy’s
largest-ever artwork at its Goodwood
Revival sale on 14 September. The
lorry was covered with graffi ti by
Banksy in 2000, when he was still very
much under the art world’s radar, and
named Turbo Zone Truck (Laugh Now
But One Day We’ll Be in Charge).
Usually, a used Volvo FL6 box lorry
costs a few thousand pounds; this one
is estimated to fetch £1m to £1.5m.
Bonhams’ global head of post war
and contemporary art, Ralph Taylor,
said : “Banksy is arguably the mostimportant artist to have emerged since
the millennium and this, his largest
commercial work, represents a new
high-water mark of quality for works
of his to appear at auction .”
The artist was at an open-air party
in Spain to celebrate the millennium
when he was presented with the lorry
by Mojo, the co-founder of Turbozone
International Circus.
He started work on it during the
party and continued for a fortnight. It
was then used, for years, as the com-
pany’s transport around the world.
It has motifs that can be seen over
and again in Banksy’s work, particu-
larly monkeys. One image is a riff on
Soviet-era posters of industrial work,
with Banksy showing a factory worker
with a mohican smashing a television.
“There are references to art his-
tory and to social history,” said Taylor.
“Banksy is always at his best when
there is that kind of vicious black
humour. When it’s funny, that’s when
it’s good and that’s why he is so suc-
cessful, that is why he keeps on being
voted the nation’s favourite artist. It
feels like he’s been coming top of those
polls for a decade.”
His work on the lorry was done at a
time street artists were often consid-
ered a menace, the reason why Banksy
always pictures himself as a rat and
calls his company Pest Control.
“For someone to give him free rein
to paint an entire lorry that would then
travel around would have been such
a huge gift and opportunity, to have
such a big canvas with no risk of get-
ting arrested,” Taylor said.
The auction record for one of Bank-
sy’s works is $1.9m (£970,000 in 2008),
for a Damien Hirst spot painting on to
which Banksy stencilled a maid doing
the cleaning.
Bonhams said the overriding mes-
sage of the lorry was anarchy : “ It’s us
against them and we’re going to win.”
Taylor said : “Contemporary art can
be anything, from a small painting to
an installation that takes up an entire
room. This is a 17-ton lorry and it is
completely painted. It’s an immersive
experience... it is incredibly impres-
sive when you see it.”
Three years ago, Bonhams sold a
Swat van Banksy created for his Barely
Legal show in Los Angeles for £218,500. Detail from the Turbo Zone Truck
by Banksy, which riff s on Soviet-era
propaganda images of heroic workers
PHOTOGRAPH: BONHAMS▲ Banksy’s graffi tied FL6 Volvo lorry from 2000, which is titled Turbo Zone
Truck (Laugh Now But One Day We’ll Be in Charge) PHOTOGRAPH: BONHAMS/SWNS.COMRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws