Thieves blew open the door of a Dutch gallery to steal two rare Warhol prints

Thieves with a penchant for pop art literally blew the doors off the MPV Gallery in Oisterwijk, Netherlands, on Friday before stealing two screen prints from Andy Warhol‘Reigning Queens’ series, one of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and the other depicting Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

According to the German art publication Monopolthe two screen prints were removed from their frames and may have been “severely damaged” during the robbery. The gallery told it Monopol that the group of photos was rare “because they all had the same numbering” and that it was a “terrible shame” that the series were separated.

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In a case where they bit off more than you can chew, the thieves had originally intended to steal all four ‘Reigning Queens’ prints on display at MPV in the South of the Netherlands, but according to the gallery’s surveillance footage the looters’ car not big enough for all four photos. The statues of Dutch Queen Beatrix and Queen Ntfombi Twala of Swaziland were left in the street as the robbers escaped.

The owner of the MPV, Mark Peet Visser, did not give up Monopol an estimated value for the stolen paintings, which, including the two left behind, would be sold at the end of November during the PAN Amsterdam art fair.

However, four numbered and hand-signed prints of Queen Beatrix were sold at auction in The Hague in 2021 for more than $235,000. In 2022, at Heffel Fine Art Auction House in Toronto, Warhol’s Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, from Reigning Queens, Royal Edition (FSII.337A) sold for just over $856,000.

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