The Biggest Banksy Sale Ever? Dealer Steve Lazarides Plans an Unsanctioned Show of the Artist’s ‘Golden Years’

The street art dealer Steve Lazarides, who was among the first to sell Banksy’s work, will open a selling show of the anonymous artist’s works at his London gallery Lazinc in July.

Lazarides told the Art Newspaper that the “museum-style” show will include 20 canvases and rare painting multiples—not street art—drawn from the holdings of 10 collectors. The dealer expects several pieces to sell for more than $2.5 million each, which would surpass Banksy’s current public sales records.

Banksy, Show Me the Monet. Courtesy of Lazinc.

“I worked with him for 11 glorious years, during which time we broke every rule in the art rule book along with a fair few laws,” wrote Lazarides on his website.

But the pair parted ways in 2008 and Banksy will probably hate the unsanctioned show “because he’s a control freak,” Lazirides told TAN. They “haven’t spoken for a decade.”

Banksy, Flower Thrower. Courtesy of Lazinc.

According to the artnet Price Database, Banksy’s auction record is $1.87 million for Keep It Spotless, a 2007 defacement of a Damien Hirst canvas that smashed its $250,000–350,000 pre-sale estimate when it appeared at Sotheby’s New York in February 2008.

Two other Banksy works have broken the million-dollar mark: the painting Simple Intelligence Testing, which sold for £636,500 ($1.3 million) that same month at Sotheby’s London, and, more recently, the sculpture Submerged Phone Booth, which fetched £722,500 ($1.2 million) at Phillips London in October 2014.

Banksy, Media at War. Courtesy of Lazinc.

The upcoming exhibition is the first show of Banksy’s paintings in 10 years, and will feature works made between 2002 and 2008. Many of these so-called “golden years” works have not been publicly exhibited since their initial sale, at important early exhibitions such as Banksy’s London solo show debut “Turf War” in 2003 and his first Los Angeles outing, “Barely Legal,” in 2006.