Master of the mediocre Banksy does it again . Two spray paintings by Banksy sold for an above-estimate £120,000 pounds each in a London sale of urban art last night.

“Laugh Now but One Day We’ll Be in Charge“  featuring a chimpanzee wearing a sandwich board, and “Bombing Middle England,” showing pensioners playing bowls with grenades, achieved the joint top price with fees at a sale by the U.K. regional auction house.

The most highly valued work in the catalog was Banksy’s early freehand painting, “Portrait of an Artist.” This failed to sell against estimates of 150,000 pounds to 200,000 pounds. Banksy’s stencil-on-foam board, “Glastonbury Sign,” acquired by the seller directly from the artist at the 2003 Glastonbury pop festival, sold for a mid-estimate 45,600 pounds.

They had been expected to fetch up to 50,000 pounds and 80,000 pounds each. Both were bought by telephone bidders. The 146-lot sale in an industrial space in Shoreditch, east London, the first of its type ever organized by a regional auction house, totaled 801,204 pounds with fees against an estimate of 672,000 pounds to 977,000 pounds, with 89 percent of the lots sold during the three-hour event, the company said.

“The results were mixed in places,” said Stephan Ludwig. “But considering what’s happening in the broader economy, particularly in an area like property, it showed that the market for this kind of art is resilient.”

An abstract portrait by Pablo Picasso on Wednesday smashed the record for an artwork sold in Australia, netting £3.1 million pounds) at an auction in Sydney.

The 1954 painting "Sylvette", which clearly showed the ponytail and young face of model and later successful artist, Sylvette David, amid bright swathes of red, yellow and green, was sold to an unidentified phone bidder.

"Sydney is the New York of the art market in the southern hemisphere," Deutscher-Menzies Galleries spokeswoman Marie Geissler told Reuters, adding the sale proved Australian galleries could sell works internationally.

The Picasso easily broke the country's previous record of A$3.48 million, paid for a work last year by Brett Whiteley, the late wild-haired bad boy of Australian Art.

Australia has been experiencing a year-long boom in art sales, driven by cashed-up collectors involved in the country's China-driven mining boom.

Damien Hirst has set new records with the first day of his sale . The works for sale include  The Golden Calf - a bull in a tank of formaldehyde, with its head crowned by a gold disc - which sold for £9.2m ($16.5m).

The extraordinary body of new work to be showcased at Sotheby’s is among his best yet.The Kingdom - a tiger shark also in formaldehyde - which sold for £9.6m ($17.2m). It had been estimated at about half that price.

The Black Sheep with the Golden Horn, another animal in formaldehyde, sold for £2.6m, within its £2-3m estimate.

The auction, entitled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, was the first of three that will sell a total of 223 art works by Mr Hirst.