BANKSY
Girl with Balloon, 2006
Spray-paint on metal
60×90 cm (23.7 x 35.5 inches)
This work is from an edition of 5
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist
Auction History
Sotheby’s London: 2 March 2022
Estimated: GBP 2,000,000 – 3,000,000
GBP 2,818,000 / USD 3,766,875
Girl with Balloon | The Now Evening Auction | | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Banksy’s Girl with Balloon is one of the most iconic artistic motifs in the world. In the present work, coming from the Robbie Williams collection, it reaches its apotheosis. Executed in grand scale, and on a roughly hewn medium that recalls the street-art roots of its creator, this work is one of the most rare and impressive extant iterations of this paradigm-shifting stencil.
Girl with Balloon is a fundamentally ambiguous image. Showing a small girl with windswept dress and hair, the viewer is unsure as to whether she has let the balloon go, or had it swept from her hand; uncertain as to whether to read this as a hopeful scene, or a desolate one. This image has become Banksy’s calling card. Akin to Andy Warhol’s soup cans, and Damien Hirst’s spots, this motif has appeared throughout his oeuvre and onwards through global visual culture. Starting in 2002, the work appeared in street murals in Shoreditch and the South bank in London. The artist created a hugely popular edition of 600 prints on paper, including 150 signed impressions, and there is an edition of 25 works on canvas that are now considered amongst the most sought-after paintings from Banksy’s career. In 2017, Girl with Balloon was voted the nation’s favorite artwork in a poll, beating Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, Constable’s The Hay Wain, and Hockney’s A Bigger Splash. As an image it is transcendent and immediately recognizable; the most famous image created by the most famous artist today.
Banksy has created multiple stunts surrounding the Girl with Balloon image. The most notorious was the dramatic live ‘shredding’ at Sotheby’s in October 2018 which notoriously dominated headlines the world over. Taking the art world by storm, that work has since been exhibited at Museum Frieder-Burda in Baden-Baden and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, where it had a substantial impact on visitor numbers. Love is in the Bin returned to Sotheby’s in October 2021 where it broke Banksy’s auction record selling for GBP 18,582,000. The centrality of the Girl with Balloon motif to this epic stunt is tribute to the far-reaching power of its image.
This work comes from the collection of Robbie Williams, who acquired it directly from the artist in 2006. Like Banksy, Robbie Williams was one of the most important figures in British culture in the 2000s. In their respective fields, each of these creative figures defined the landscape. It is befitting that Williams owned such an iconic piece of British art and in the context of Williams’ ownership, it is easier to read the message of the work as hopeful.
