London (AFP)
Street artist Banksy is selling a triptych of paintings on the migration crisis on Tuesday for a children's hospital in Bethlehem, West Bank, according to London auction house Sotheby's, responsible for the sale.
The three oil paintings that make up "View of the Mediterranean Sea, 2017" constitute the artist's response to the migration crisis that has hit Europe since the 2010s.
This one "took three old romantic canvases which represented seascapes of the XIXe century", which it then dotted with "life jackets or abandoned buoys", explains Sotheby's in a press release.
With these canvases, Banksy "juxtaposes in his inimitable style a historical artistic genre with a contemporary political question - the tragic death of thousands of migrants who tried to cross the Mediterranean to reach the European Union", according to the auction house.
Since its creation in 2017, the triptych, on sale between 800,000 and 1.2 million pounds (878,000 and 1.3 million euros), was exhibited in Bethlehem, in the hotel "The Walled Off" opened by the artist himself, where all the rooms face directly 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 painted a portrait of Steve Job, co-founder of Apple and son of a Syrian migrant, on the wall of a refugee camp in Calais, in 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.
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