Girl with Balloon
Girl with Balloon (also, Balloon Girl or Girl and Balloon) is a series of stencil murals around London by the graffiti artist Banksy, started in 2002. They depict a young girl with her hand extended toward a red heart-shaped balloon carried away by the wind. The locations for this work include street murals in Shoreditch and the South bank in London on the Waterloo Bridge and other murals were around London, though none remain there.
| Girl with Balloon | |
|---|---|
Original mural on Waterloo Bridge in South Bank in 2004 | |
| Artist | Banksy |
| Year | 2002 |
Banksy has several times used variants of this design to support social campaigns: in 2005 about the West Bank barrier, in 2014 about the Syrian refugee crisis, and also about the 2017 UK election. A 2017 Samsung poll ranked Girl with Balloon as the United Kingdom's number one favourite artwork.
In 2018, a framed copy of the work got spontaneously shredded during an auction, by way of a mechanical device Banksy had hidden in the frame. Banksy confirmed that he was responsible for the shredding and gave the altered piece a new name, Love is in the Bin. Sotheby's said it was "the first work in history ever created during a live auction."