- London police received a call that a woman was unconscious in an art gallery on November 25.
- After breaking the door in, they realized the woman was actually just a sculpture.
- Mark Jenkins, the artist behind the piece, said people often confuse his sculptures for real people.
London police forcibly entered a Soho art gallery thinking they were going to save a woman slumped over a table only to find that the woman was a piece of art.
The London Metropolitan Police Authority confirmed the incident in a statement to Insider. Police received a call on the evening of Friday, November 25 from someone concerned there was a person, unconscious on a table, who had been locked inside the Laz Emporium.
Twenty minutes later, the police broke down the door to enter the gallery to discover the woman was a sculpture.
“Hannah [Blakemore] who was working in the gallery that day had just locked up and gone upstairs to make a cup of tea,” Steve Lazarides, Banksy’s former agent and the founder of Laz Emporium, said in a statement shared with Insider. “She came down to find the door off its hinges and two confused police officers!”
The sculpture, titled “Kristina,” features a disheveled woman in a yellow hoodie and black tights with her face down in a bowl of soup.
Blakemore told ArtNet news that the piece has fooled observers before. People called emergency services for “Kristina” in October while it was on display at an interior-design fair known as Decorex.
The sculpture, which Lazarides comissioned, is meant to portray his sister, also named Kristina. The American artist Mark Jenkins, known for his hyper-realistic human casts, created the piece.
“I wondered if the police were going to pay for the door,” Jenkins told Insider in an email when asked about his reactions to the news.
He achieves the realistic look to his art by creating casts of real people and placing them in sedentary positions, Jenkins said. The “Kristina” sculpture is made with packing tape and foam filler, according to the press release.
Jenkins said he has a lot of stories of people mistaking his art for actual humans, but never heard of anyone breaking into a private space because of his work, let alone an art gallery, before.
As for what Jenkins hopes art enjoyers take away when seeing “Kristina” he said: “The holiday spirit mostly.”
“Kristina” will be on display at Laz Emporium until December 24.
