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Less than 48 hours after being unveiled and vandals have already defaced the UK’s first public statue of David Bowie .
Titled ‘Earthly Messenger’, the bronze sculpture was placed in Aylesbury’s Market Square, Buckinghamshire, where the legendary musician debuted the persona Ziggy Stardust.
“Feed the homeless first” was written with black spray paint at the foot of the statue, while “RIP DB” was plastered on the walls beside it.
The statue, a tribute to Bowie who died in January 2016 aged 69, was unveiled by Steve Hogarth, the lead singer of British rock band Marillion.
"It’s with a heavy heart and despair I hear that within 48 hours someone has defaced Andrew Sinclair's breathtaking David Bowie double-statue," Hogarth said.
"Hopefully this is just a glitch and this fabulous work of art will give people a reason to come to Aylesbury for many years to come."
The work was paid for by a £100,000 crowdfunding appeal set up by David Stopps, along with money raised through grants.
“We can get that paint off, we will be working on it today,” Stoops told the BBC.
“It is a public piece of art and we will keep looking after it on a daily basis. There is a webcam on it 24/7 so whoever did it, we have got them on webcam.”
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculpturesShow all 19 1 /19Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Sunrise in the Mountains' by David Bomberg (1935) Oil on canvas estimated to sell for £150,000-250,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Forms on a Bow No.2' by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1960) Estimated to sell for £70,000-100,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Untitled' by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1984) Acrylic, spray paint and paper collage on canvas, estimated to sell for £500,000-700,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Mendica' by Francis Picabia (1930) Oil on canvas, estimated to sell for £600,000-800,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Foyer' by Patrick Caulfield (1973) Acrylic on canvas, estimated to sell at £400,000-600,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Thorn Bush' by Graham Sutherland (1947-48) Crayon, charcoal, watercolour, ink and gouache, estimated to sell at £25,000-35,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Trevalgan' by Peter Lanyon (1951) Oil on board estimated to sell for £200,000-300,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'St Ives Harbour' by Winifred Nicholson (1928) Oil and coloured pencil on panel, estimated to sell for £50,000-70,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Fangalo' by Norman Catherine Store oil, wood and mixed media, estimated to sell for £10,000-15,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'What Happened in the Western Cape?' by Willie Bester Mixed media assemblage on board, estimated to sell for £2,000-3,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Mannerbildnis (Portrait of a Man)' by Erich Heckel (1919) Woodcut printed in black, blue, green and ochre, estimated to sell for £30,000-50,000
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Frank Auerbach, Head of Gerda Boehm, 1965, oil on board, £300,000-500,000 “My God, yeah! I want to sound like that looks” – David Bowie on Frank Auerbach’s work, quoted in the New York Times, 1998. Bowie loved the rich, sculptural effects of Auerbach’s paintings (“I find his kind of bas- relief way of painting extraordinary. Sometimes I’m not really sure if I’m dealing with sculpture or painting”), and clearly felt a deep affinity with the artist, whose work could provoke in him a whole gamut of reactions: “It will give spiritual weight to my angst. Some mornings I’ll look at it and go, “Oh, God, yeah! I know!’’ But that same painting, on a different day, can produce in me an incredible feeling of the triumph of trying to express myself as an artist.” [Ibid] Head of Gerda Boehm, a portrait of the artist’s cousin, was last exhibited at the Royal Academy, when Bowie lent the work to Auerbach’s much- heralded retrospective in 2001.
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Jean-Michel Basquiat, Air Power, 1984, acrylic and oilstick on canvas, £2.5-3.5m The Bowie-Basquiat connection is best known through the lens of Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, in which David played the role of the young artist’s mentor and collaborator, Andy Warhol. Air Power was acquired by Bowie the following year.
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Damien Hirst, Beautiful, Shattering, Slashing, Violent, Pinky, Hacking, Sphincter Painting, 1995, household gloss on canvas, £250,000-350,000 Bursting with a magnificently dynamic energy in its pulsating kaleidoscope of reds, greens, blues and yellows, this is a vibrant and powerful example of Damien Hirst’s trademark ‘spin’ paintings. Hirst was one of only a handful of high-profile contemporary artists for whom Bowie publicly expressed his admiration, interviewing the ‘Young British Artist’ for Modern Painters in 1995. “He’s different. I think his work is extremely emotional, subjective, very tied up with his own personal fears – his fear of death is very strong – and I find his pieces moving and not at all flippant”, said Bowie in an interview with the New York Times.
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Ettore Sottsass, 'Casablanca' Sideboard, 1981, £4,000-6,000 Breaking with the minimalist aesthetic that characterised furniture design in the 1970s, Ettore Sottsass and the Milan-based Memphis group revolutionised cutting-edge design, introducing fun, humour and strikingly bold colour combinations. The ‘Casablanca’ Sideboard, from the first Memphis collection in 1981, is considered a defining work of Post- Modern design, with examples held in numerous major museum collections around the world including the V&A in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museo dei Mobile e delle Sculture Lignee, Milan.
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Harold Gilman ,Interior (Mrs Mounter), 1917, oil on canvas, £150,000-250,000 Harold Gilman’s painting, an essay in stillness, of the remains of the day, appears at first glance to be anything but revolutionary. But in the context of British art in the early 20th century, it is, in its own quiet and covert way, very radical. This was a new kind of subject, a suburban lodger and part-time charlady, lost in thought in a nondescript room in an ordinary London house. For art to be modern, artists like Gilman demanded that it should be concerned with the everyday life of the city, with the peripheral and unseen, with the working classes. All of this must not have been lost on Bowie, a boy born in Brixton just after the Second World War, when much of London’s housing stock was still as it was in the early part of the century – grand Georgian houses subdivided into flats and bedsits, with tall thin sash windows, linoleum floors and a stove for heat.
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Romuald Hazoumé Alexandra, 1995, found objects £5,000-£7,000 Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumé is probably best known for his sculptural assemblages of commonplace found objects, such as Alexandra. Much like Marcel Duchamp and his ‘Readymades’, Hazoumé appropriates familiar objects and reconfigures them, creating a dialogue between art history and the history of colonialism in Africa, as well as contemporary African politics, especially those surrounding oil. Alexandra is indicative of Bowie’s far-reaching collecting interests, as well as his love of works with multiple layers of meaning and a sense of mischief and play. Bowie’s approach to contemporary African art – as with all other elements of the collection – was marked by a deep intellectual rigour, exemplified by his five- page review of the inaugural Johannesburg Biennale for Modern Painters in 1995.
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Peter Lanyon, Witness, 1961, oil on canvas, £250,000-350,000 Witness is one of three works by Peter Lanyon that Bowie loaned to the artist’s retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2010. Lanyon painted Witness two years after he had first taken to the skies in a glider. This new activity allowed him to see the Cornish landscape from a radically different perspective and to bring bigger, more elemental forces into his painting, becoming “like the mountaineer who cannot see the clouds without feeling the lift inside them.” This is a painting of American scale and ambition, painted in a converted sail-loft in a small fishing town on the western-most tip of England.
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Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Pier Giacomo and Achille Castiglioni, Brionvega Radiophonograph, model no RR 126, 1965, £800-1,200 It perhaps comes as no surprise to discover that the most innovative and daring musician of his generation listened to music on such an unconventional record player. Created by brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Brionvega, this playful stereo cabinet is a definitive piece of 1960s Italian design, with examples in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York and the V&A in London.
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Designed by Andrew Sinclair, the statue features various likenesses of Bowie, Ziggy Stardust being front-and-centre.
Bowie first performed as Stardust at the Friars venue in the early 1970s, debuting material from the 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars .
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