Suspects in Banksy’s ‘Girl With Balloon’ Theft Head to Court Next Month

Two men accused of stealing Banksy’s painting Girl With Balloon from a London gallery late Sunday night are set to appear before the court next month on charges with non-residential burglary, according to NBC News.

The picture was stolen late Sunday night from Grove Gallery on New Cavendish Street in central London. Girl With Balloon was the only work stolen, however it wasn’t missing for long.  By Thursday, police had brought two suspects in custody and the painting recovered. 

Grove Gallery was hosting an exhibition of works by the cloak-and-dagger artist titled “Banksy’s London Rebellion,” which opened on August 21 and closed September 7, the day before the heist. According to the BBC there more than $2 million of art in the gallery at the time.

Court documents priced the Girl With Ballon print at $354,000. CCTV footage of the burglary shows a man dressed in black plants and a black hoodie, with his face covered, smashing the glass front door of the gallery with a heavy object, then ramming his shoulder into the cracked glass until he can fit through. Once inside he plucks the picture off the wall and quickly walks out.

Girl With Ballon, which features a small, windswept girl in black and white reaching for a bright red heart-shaped ballon, is one of Banksy’s most recognizable works. In 2018, during an auction at Sotheby’s a version of the painting was shredded on stage by mechanism hidden in its Baroque frame just seconds after it hammered for $1.4 million. That work, which was retitled Love is in the Bin, sold in 2021 for $25.3 million at Sotheby’s London. 

Earlier this year ,a man in Paris was handed a two-year suspended sentence for attempting to steal a Banksy work that was stenciled on the back of a parking sign near the Centre Pompidou. 

Most recently, Banksy spent part of his summer stenciling images of wildlife across London. There were nine images in all, with a new stencil added each night for nine consecutive nights. Many people liked the rhinoceros the best, but the piranhas took the cake.