FRIEZE!

Thief Snatches $20K Painting From Pop-Up Show in Abandoned London Hotel

“The thieves have no chance of reselling it,” the gallery owner said, “so they’ll either covet the work in secret, or they’ll abandon and destroy it—that would break my heart.”

Possibly fashioning himself after Thomas Crown or a Donna Tartt protagonist, an unknown man waltzed into a pop-up art show at the Frieze art fair in London last week, absconding with a painting worth $20,000 in the dead of night. The man was captured on CCTV breaking into the Averard Hotel, a derelict building often used as a cultural event space, around 2 a.m. on Wednesday. Strangely, according to Artnet, it was more than six hours before he was captured again, leaving the hotel with German artist Sarah Księska’s 2021 work Präparat in hand. What made the crime even more, pardon the pun, artful is that the event’s organizers—affiliated with Ramiken, a downtown New York gallery—recognized the man as a visitor to the show the previous night. “I put out a £10,000 reward to give the thieves a chance to return the painting by proxy without getting in trouble,” Ramiken founder Mike Egan told the outlet. “The thieves have no chance of reselling it, so they’ll either covet the work in secret, or they’ll abandon and destroy it—that would break my heart, as if I’ve been ghosted, which is the worst feeling.”