In 2014, “Stealing Banksy,” an auction of works by the notorious British street artist, put up for sale several pieces peeled, chipped or otherwise removed from the streets where he had made them. Had they waited until this year, they could have added one more to the list: a print stolen from a huge exhibition of the artist’s work in Toronto before it even had a chance to open on Wednesday.

The work in question is called Trolley Hunters, a satirical image of Neanderthal-ish men hunting a shopping cart. It’s said to be the artist’s critique on corporate food production. Its value is estimated at $45,000.

“We can confirm a piece of art went missing during setup of ‘The Art of Banksy’ exhibition in Toronto. The incident was reported to the police who are currently investigating the disappearance,” confirmed Corey Ross, president of Starvox Exhibits, in a statement Thursday. “Due to the investigation, we will not be commenting further at this time.”

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A spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service confirmed it was investigating the theft and break and enter. Later Thursday, police released video appearing to show the theft, while the exhibition was still being set up.

The video shows a man enter the empty gallery, installed in a former warehouse at 213 Sterling Rd., through an interior door shortly after 5 a.m. Sunday. He passes through two large galleries in the midst of being installed before arriving at a wall hung with several framed prints. He picks one up, gingerly, holding it away from his body, and makes his way through the two galleries and out the door where he came in. There are no other people and no sign of security guards anywhere in the video.

The suspect wore glasses, a black jacket, a green camouflage baseball hat, blue jeans rolled at the cuff, and a pair grey running shoes, police say.

The Toronto Police Service is seeking assistance with a Break-and-Enter investigation.

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The exhibition, which runs until July 11, is said to contain some $35 million of the artist’s work. Banksy himself has publicly disowned the show along with its curator, Steve Lazarides, a former close confidant of the artist.

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It marks the third such high-profile theft in Toronto this year. The Hockey Hall of Fame lost a Stanley Cup ring donated by former NHL star Paul Kariya in February when a thief let himself into a storage closet, where he or she pocketed the unprotected ring. In March, a woman was seen on video making off with a stone from Yoko Ono’s installation “The Riverbed” at the Gardiner Museum on which the artist had written “Love Yourself,” valued at $22,000. Neither object has been recovered.

Banksy’s work has long been the target of theft, though it’s most often been his works in public, not in private exhibitions. A 2004 heist was among the most brazen. The piece, a giant satire of Rodin’s The Thinker, its subject fitted with a traffic cone for a top hat, was improbably stolen in broad daylight in central London.

At 3 metres tall and notably signed by Banksy, it was hardly a surreptitious affair. A group of men loaded it into the back of a van and took off. The heist became the subject of a 2016 documentary, The Banksy Job. Banksy offered the thieves a ransom of £2 ($3.45 Canadian) to have it returned, after they had demanded £5,000.

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