‘Love Is in the Bin,’ Banky’s Notorious Self-Shredded Artwork, Is Already Getting Its First Museum Show

The museum will be the first institution to present the work since Sotheby's showed it at its London headquarters after the sale.

Banksy's Love Is in the Bin (2018). Courtesy of Sotheby's.

Banksy’s self-shredding artwork is on the move.

A private museum in the south of Germany will be the first institution to exhibit the picture, titled Love is in the Bin (2018). The artwork will go on view at for one month, from February 5 and March 3, at publishing magnate Frieder Burda’s eponymous museum.

The work famously shredded itself shortly after it was hammered down at £1 million ($1.4 million) at a Sotheby’s auction in London in October. Following the sale, the artist changed the title from Girl with a Balloon to Love is in the Bin and the winning bidder, identified only as a female European collector, decided to keep the work in its newly destroyed form.

In a statement, the German museum said the owner of the picture was convinced to lend it to the museum (despite stiff competition from other quarters”) because of the institution’s strong track record of exhibiting urban art, including a JR exhibition in 2014. To buttress the Banksy presentation, the museum will host a talk titled, “Can the strategies of the art market be torpedoed while adding to fuel to its fire?”

“We are expecting great interest from the public, especially young people and Banksy fans,” Museum Frieder Burda director Henning Schaper said in the statement. “At the same time, we have to resist the temptation to display the picture like a trophy. That would definitely not be what the artist had in mind. Instead, we are trying to adhere to his approach of consistently democratizing art and we are currently discussing how to make the picture accessible to as many people as possible.”

Meanwhile, Burda, the museum’s founder, said he was “delighted to be able to exhibit such an exciting and unusual work of art in our museum and continue the critical art discourse about it.”


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