U2 To Auction Off Famous Artwork
Celebrities often buy and sell art, (as Hugh Grant did last year when he parted with his Warhol) but it's rarer that the painting belongs to a band. The piece above, a powerful painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat belonging to rock band U2, will be auctioned July 1 at Sotheby's London. Untitled (Pecho/Oreja), completed in 1983, is estimated to sell for £4-6 million ($7.775-11.662 million) but could go higher.
U2 bassist Adam Clayton first spotted the painting, which is acrylic, oil stick and paper collage on canvas, and the band bought it way back in 1989, a year after Basqiat's untimely death. It has hung in their Dublin studio ever since. The painting, which was begun when Basquiat was just 22 features some of his popular motifs including the stylized, skull-like face, the small crown and his use of words and scrawled lines to invoke an urgent chaos. BBC News reports that the current auction record for a Basquiat work stands at $14.6 million.
