Girl with Balloon’s ascent to icon status began slowly. After the initial Shoreditch stencil and another version in London’s Southbank, appearing in 2002, the work remained little more than a local street art fixture, attractive to passersby but unknown to the wider cultural milieu. It wasn’t until two years after Girl with Balloon’s initial appearance that Banksy embraced the image’s potential for widespread reproduction. He partnered with photographer and curator Steve Lazarides’s Pictures on Walls imprint to release the only extant print edition of Girl with Balloon.

The pair produced 600 unsigned and unnumbered prints, 150 signed and numbered prints, and 88 colored artist’s proofs, which the artist sold both online and at an annual “squat art concept store” called Santa’s Ghetto. At a Sotheby’s London sale in October 2018, an anonymous collector purchased a Girl with Balloon painting for £1.1 million. Shortly after the sale was hammered down, a hidden mechanism in the painting’s frame activated, shredding the work live on the podium and sending the tattered strands to the floor. The press widely covered the stunt, which led to what may be the greatest expansion yet in Banksy’s presence on the secondary market.

As for the painting that shredded itself at auction, it sold in its tattered state, under the new title Love is in the Bin (2018), for $25.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction in October 2021. This set a new auction record for Banksy. Since 2019, a majority of Girl with Balloon prints have sold for six-figure prices at auction, and a number of the colored artist’s proofs have sold for more than $1 million. A proof in the gold colorway sold for £1.1 million ($1.5 million) at a Sotheby’s auction in March 2021.

Private Collection, Auckland
Purchased from Pictures on Walls, London
Accompanied by Certificate of Authenticity from Pest Control