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Monday 25 February 2013

Stolen Banksy Jubilee work listed for auction at £450,000

A Banksy painting has been put up for sale on an American auction website, after it was removed from the side of a Poundland shop in Wood Green, north London, last week.

The work appeared last May, and is thought to have been created by the controversial street artist Banksy. Known as Slave Labour (Bunting Boy), the piece shows a young boy hunched over a sewing machine making Union Jack bunting, and has been interpreted as a reaction to the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, the riots of August 2011 and the London Olympics.

The work has now been listed on Fine Art Auctions Miami site as one of the 118 pieces in a Modern, Contemporary and Street Art sale happening on Saturday. It has an estimate of $500,000-700,000 (£322,000-£450,000), and is the second Banksy piece in the sale, alongside 2007 work Wet Dog, which appeared in Bethlehem.

Fine Art Auctions Miami owner Frederic Thut told the Sun that the work had been listed by a "well-known collector". He said that the collector had followed normal procedure, and had signed a contract to say "everything was above board." The collector, who Thut refused to name, is not British and the piece, Slave Labour, is in storage in Europe.

Wood Green residents have expressed anger over the listing, with councillor Alan Strickland saying, "Banksy gave our community that painting for free. Someone has taken it and plans to make a huge amount for themselves, which is disgusting and counter to the spirit in which it was given."

Banksy's work has been at the centre of a number of thefts. In spring 2011 a piece known as Sperm Alarm was taken from outside a hotel in Central London, only to appear on online auction site eBay for £17,000. A gang of thieves, disguised as workmen, were caught trying to steal a piece from a derelict building in Liverpool in 2006.

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