Banksy’s ‘Battle to Survive a Broken Heart’ on View at Brookfield Place

Brookfield Place shoppers will now find a colossal work by the street artist Banksy amid the designer stores in New York City.

The elusive artist, whose identity has never been revealed, created “Battle to Survive a Broken Heart,” a red heart-shaped balloon covered in bandages, on the exterior of a warehouse wall in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in October 2013. The 9-foot x 6-foot section of that century-old wall, which is estimated to weigh 7,500 pounds, was excised and is now on view at The Winter Garden at Brookfield Place. It will be on view there until it is auctioned on May 21 at Guernsey’s New York headquarters. The graffiti piece’s current location and its back story gives the name added meaning.

In an interview Wednesday, Anastasios Georgiadis described how his late father Vassilios unknowingly met Banksy outside of his Red Hook warehouse in 2013. While smoking a cigarette outside of the building, the elder Georgiadis saw where the artist had parked on a hazardous corner and he suggested moving his van into the warehouse driveway to avoid being clipped on the corner.

“He had to run to the store for some cigarettes and a cup of coffee. My father said the guy looked a little shaggy. He had sunglasses on and one of those fisherman hats,” Anastasios Georgiadis said. “My father said he was around 5’10” and had a little bit of an accent. When he parked in the driveway, he thanked my father a lot. He asked my father if he needed anything from the store, and he said, ‘Nah, but thank you. I appreciate that.’ He offered him [Banksy] a Marlboro Red too, but he said, ‘No thank you, I’m going to buy my own.’”

The anonymous talent was in the midst of a monthlong residency that was titled “Better Out Than In,” and was creating and documenting one work a day. As for whether the Red Hook mural, which Banksy later did clandestinely, could have been a sign of thanks, Anastasios Georgiadis said, “He had to know something. He saw the way that my father was dressed. He was sitting outside of the warehouse having a cigarette and he was the only guy out there.”

Asked if it was the artist’s way of thanking his father, Georgiadis said maybe, but the wall had also been painted the week before. “Or he may have seen the pain in my father’s eyes. My father had also lost a lot of money and maybe $2 million worth of tools in Hurricane Sandy [weeks before.]”

When the decision was made to knock down the warehouse for a storefront, luxury condos and a community center, Georgiadis and his family, whose mother owned the building, decided to preserve the work in a highly secured warehouse in Queens. Most of the auction’s proceeds will benefit the American Heart Association, since his father died of a heart attack in January 2021 at the age of 67. A choked-up Georgiadis said that the family decided to auction the work to let his father rest in peace. “It’s really the last thing of his that we have. We want to see it go into somebody’s hands, who will appreciate the art and take care of the art. We want to see it handed off,” he said.

The work has a pre-sale estimate of $1 million to $3 million with a starting bid of $500,000, according to president Arlan Ettinger. Unlike work from such legendary artists as Pablo Picasso, whose work has come up at auction for years, Banksy’s work has been scarce. Some have sold in the six-figure range; “Love Is in the Bin” fetched $25.4 million in 2021. Ettinger said, “Certainly, this one is, based on everything that we can discover, is the largest Banksy ever to be sold. In the art world, size does count,” he said, adding that the family’s commitment to donate a substantial amount from the sale may enhance interest.

“Battle to Survive a Broken Heart” was transported to Brookfield Place at 9 p.m. on Tuesday night via a “Hi-low” forklift and installed dead center in Brookfield Place atrium. Ettinger said, “It’s hard to call a wall of museum quality, but it certainly is. There are about a dozen beautiful towering palm trees. It is the glass enclosure that was unfortunately struck, when that tragedy occurred [referring to the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001.]