The artist will donate the profits to this hospital to finance a new stroke care unit and the purchase of equipment for the rehabilitation of children.
The Walled Off Hotel, opened by Banksy in Bethlehem, in the Palestinian Territories, and adjacent to the separation wall built by Israel.
A triptych of street artist Banksy on the migration crisis was sold 2.2 million pounds (2.4 million euros during Tuesday night) at Sotheby’s in London, to benefit a children’s hospital in Bethlehem, West Bank. The result greatly exceeded estimates – between 800,000 and 1.2 million pounds (883,000 and 1.3 million euros).
The three oil paintings that make up “View of the Mediterranean Sea, 2017” constitute the artist’s response to the migratory crisis that has hit Europe since the 2010s. He “took three old romantic canvases which depicted nineteenth-century seascapes, “which he then dotted with” abandoned life jackets or buoys, “Sotheby’s said in a statement.
Purchase of equipment and new unit
With these canvases, Banksy “juxtaposes in his inimitable style a historical artistic genre with a contemporary political issue – the tragic deaths of thousands of migrants who tried to cross the Mediterranean to reach the European Union”, according to the auction house. More than 100,000 migrants tried to cross the Mediterranean in 2019 and more than 1,200 perished at sea, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Since its creation in 2017, the triptych has been on display in Bethlehem, in the hotel “The Walled Off” opened by the artist himself, where all rooms face directly on the wall erected by Israel in the West Bank. Banksy announced that he would donate all the profits to BASR hospital in Bethlehem, to finance a new stroke care unit and the purchase of equipment for the rehabilitation of children.
The contemporary artist regularly addresses the issue of the migration crisis. In 2015 he had painted a portrait of Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and son of a Syrian migrant, on the wall of a refugee camp in Calais, northern France. He also made in 2019, at the Venice Biennale, the stencil of a child in a life jacket, holding a pink distress rocket.
