London CNN –
A new Banksy artwork was reportedly removed from a London street shortly after the artist posted it on Instagram.
The anonymous artist posted a series of photos of the work – which consists of three drones on a stop sign – on social media around midday local time (7 a.m. ET) on Friday.
But at 12.30pm two men were seen using bolt cutters to remove the sign from a junction in Peckham, south-east London, witnesses told PA Media.
“I opened Instagram and saw it was posted four minutes ago and I was about to go on my lunch break. When I got there there were about two people there. We all admired it and took photos,” Alex, 26, told PA.
“This guy comes and grabs the sign. We watched in awe as he hit it,” added Alex, who recounted how the man failed to remove the sign with his hands and walked away for a few minutes before returning with the bolt cutters.
“We said, 'What are you doing?' But no one really knew what to do, we just watched it happen. “We were all a bit confused,” the witness continued.
Aaron Chown/AP
The man appeared to take the sign away.
“He ripped it off, ran across the street and ran away. He did not say anything. The art itself didn’t seem to be that important to him,” Alex added.
Another witness, who told PA he preferred to remain anonymous, expressed disappointment that the sign had been removed.
“It's strange, these works of art are beautiful, it would be nice if they had stayed there for a while,” he said.
PA reported that Banksy himself is not believed to be behind the removal of the artwork.
The mysterious artist is known to confirm his works on social media without making any further comment.
Some have interpreted the recent post as a call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, as Banksy is known to support the Palestinian cause.
The artist owns a hotel in the city of Bethlehem, just steps from Israel's imposing separation wall that runs through the occupied West Bank.
Banksy opened the Walled Off Hotel in 2017 to raise awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it describes itself as the hotel with the “worst view in the world.”
Although the market value of his work has risen sharply in recent years, Banksy continues to produce works in public spaces that are nearly impossible to preserve – and even invite theft or defacement.
“Spy Booth,” one of Banksy’s most famous murals depicting three secret agents surrounding a phone booth with recording devices, was destroyed in 2016.
And in February this year, an abandoned freezer that was part of an artwork that had appeared in the English town of Margate was taken away just hours after Banksy confirmed the piece as his work.
In 2018, the artist famously destroyed one of his own works – his painting of a girl with a red balloon ripped itself apart shortly after it sold at auction for $1.4 million.