(5 Dec 2013) A painting on a Los Angeles gas station wall by world-famous, anonymous graffiti artist Banksy could fetch 300-thousand US dollars at a Beverly Hills auction on Thursday.
The piece entitled "Flower Girl", painted on a brick wall at the station owned by Eytan Rosenberg, joins four other Banksy pieces from Berlin and London.
The 9-by-8 foot (2.7 metres by 2.4 metres) piece of wall will be up for bid at Julien's Auctions with the other pieces, which are painted on plywood, concrete walls and doors.
When a friend asked Rosenberg if a British artist could paint the side wall of his gas station, Rosenberg had no idea that he would soon be the owner of a work by Banksy.
The "Flower Girl" piece came to be in 2008, when Rosenberg met who he believes was Banksy - not that he knew it at the time.
Rosenberg said Banksy approached him, asking to paint the mural.
"He introduced himself, I shook his hand. I said, yeah, go ahead. I was busy, didn't really take any much more time, than yeah go ahead, go do it, then went back to work. Later to know that I probably met Banksy himself and had no clue," said Rosenberg.
A few days later, one of his employees called to say that the gas station had been tagged.
Rosenberg told him to paint over it immediately, and then remembered the conversation with a friend of a friend, a British man who wanted to paint his wall.
Rosenberg had dozens of security cameras aimed at his family's gas station, but the tape had mysteriously gone black.
Last year, when Rosenberg sold the gas station that his family had owned since 1977, he took great pains to preserve "Flower Girl", no small feat given that it's painted on a 15-inch (38-centimetre) thick wall.
He consulted experts and fashioned a sturdy aluminium frame that can be hung - if the buyer has a building sturdy enough.
Banksy's other pieces that are for sale were created from 2002 to 2004, when few had heard of his witty, anti-capitalist work.
"Back in 2002, very few people knew who Banksy was. But when the 'Exit through the Gift Shop' documentary came out in 2010, all of a sudden that really put him on the map," said Michael Doyle of Julien's Auctions.
"To have such an early example of this is really a great opportunity for a collector," said Doyle, giving context to the paintings' dates.

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