While the sad saga of troubled singer Amy Winehouse plays out in very public fashion, one artist in New York has created a grisly tribute to the star.

The statue is from artist Marco Perego's show 'The Only Good Rock Star Is A Dead Rock Star' and shows Winehouse, 25, lying in a pool of blood with a bullet hole in her head after being shot by William S Burroughs, the American beat poet and novelist, who sits nearby holding a rifle.

It plays on an incident in which Burroughs, an opiate addict, shot dead his girlfriend Joan Vollmer while playing a game of William Tell at a party in Mexico City in 1951. Tell, the medieval Swiss outlaw of legend, used a crossbow to shoot an apple on his son's head. Burroughs, who went on to write Naked Lunch and died in 1997, aged 83, used a revolver to fire at the apple on Vollmer's head.

The sculpture, which is on sale for about $100, 000 (£63,000), will fill the Half Gallery, a new exhibition space in Manhattan's Bowery district on the Lower East Side.