Girl
With Balloon

In March 2014, Banksy reworked the, by then, extremely high-profile stencil to mark the third anniversary of the civil war in Syria. The redesigned image was used to promote #withsyria, a campaign to raise awareness and rally support for the victims of the three-year-long conflict. The campaign denounces ‘years of brutality and bloodshed that have turned Syria into the epicentre of a massive humanitarian crisis’. In this version, Girl With Balloon appeared with a headscarf to depict a Syrian refugee.

Besides Banksy, other celebrities joined forces in the campaign to raise awareness, among them Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Edith Bowman, Peter Gabriel and David Milliband, who all posted pictures of themselves holding a red balloon on their Twitter or Instagram accounts.

Photographs of Syrian children holding red balloons in the style of Banksy's famous balloon girl also went viral. As part of the same campaign, the refugee version of Girl With Balloon was projected on Nelson's Column and the Eiffel Tower.

Banksy has always been in contention with the art world, and so it is unsurprising that his most recognisable print was part of perhaps the most-talked-about stunt in art history. On the 5th of October 2018, when the gavel dropped on Girl with Balloon (sold for £1.3 million) the work sank through the bottom of its gilt frame and emerged shredded to the sound of sirens. The work itself was re-authenticated by Pest Control and titled Love is in the Bin, which was then brought as a new work by an anonymous Sotheby’s client.

In July 2017, a Samsung poll of 2,000 people from the UK asked participants about their favourite British piece of art. The poll's results ranked Banksy's Girl with Balloon as number one. Banksy's iconic stencil was chosen over works by Constable, JMW Turner, Thomas Gainsborough and John Everett Millais, as well as Antony Gormley's sculpture The Angel of the North, Anish Kapoor's ArcelorMittal Orbit and album covers for the Beatles, Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols.

A year later Girl With Balloon became the subject of the most talked-about stunt in art history, when a signed canvas of the work self-destructed in front of the entire saleroom, as the hammer came down on the final £1.4 million bid at Sotheby's Evening Sale. Banksy posted an image of the work shredding itself on his own Instagram feed the same day, with the caption: ‘Going, going, gone … ’.

After the auction Pest Control, Banksy’s only authentication body, gave the work a new title, Love Is In The Bin. The buyer of the work, a female European collector, proceeded with her purchase, commenting, “When the hammer came down last week and the work was shredded, I was at first shocked, but gradually I began to realise that I would end up with my own piece of art history.”

Why we love Girl With Balloon... "This work is a true icon of contemporary art – like Andy Warhol’s Marilyn before her, Girl with Balloon will come to represent a specific moment in history. Well loved by the public and collectors alike, her heartbreaking gesture reaches out to all of us making this one of the most powerful artworks of the 21st century." - Joe Syer

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