Girl with Balloon

Girl with Balloon is the Banksy print most people know without knowing much else about him: a small girl in black, reaching for a red heart-shaped balloon that has just slipped away from her. It started as a stencil on the South Bank in London in 2002, on the steps up to Waterloo Bridge, and two years later it became a screenprint, published by his own print house, Pictures on Walls, in two editions.

There are 150 signed prints and 600 unsigned, all from 2004, and those two editions behave almost like two different markets. A signed Girl with Balloon is worth around £186,000 today and an unsigned one around £78,000, so the signature alone accounts for more than £100,000 of difference on otherwise identical sheets.

The painting that shredded itself

Much of the print's fame comes from one evening at Sotheby's in October 2018, when a framed painted version of the image sold for just over £1 million and then, as the hammer came down, slid halfway through a shredder hidden in its own frame. Banksy renamed the half-shredded work Love is in the Bin, and when it came back to Sotheby's in 2021 it sold for about £18.6 million.

That story did two things to the print market. It made Girl with Balloon the most recognisable image in contemporary art for a while, and it arrived just before the 2020 and 2021 surge in Banksy prices, which gave the prints of this image the highest peak of any.

What the prints have sold for

We have 33 results for the signed edition and 86 for the unsigned on record, going back to 2007, and the shape of both is the same: a slow climb for more than a decade, a near-vertical rise through 2020, a peak in early 2021, and then a long fall.

The highest result for a regular signed print is £513,000, at Sotheby's in September 2021, and our value for the signed edition peaked at about £537,000 in January 2021. For the unsigned edition the highest result is £328,665, at Bonhams in March 2021, and the value peaked at about £239,000 a month later. From those peaks, both editions lost more than two thirds of their value by the start of 2026.

This year

Girl with Balloon has been one of the strongest prints of 2026, and it has recovered faster than the market as a whole. Our value for the unsigned edition is up about 22% in twelve months, helped by results of £115,200 at Sotheby's in March and £109,650 at Phillips on 17 September, both well above where it was selling a year earlier. The signed edition is up about 10%, and it had its best day in years on 23 September, when number 17 of 150 made £249,175 at Rago and number 129 made £204,800 at Sotheby's, a few hours apart.

For context, the whole Banksy print market is up about 4% over the same year, so this image is leading the recovery rather than following it, which is what you would expect of the print every new collector wants first.

What to check before buying one

Because it is the most valuable Banksy print, it is also the most faked, so the certificate matters more here than anywhere. Every genuine print should come with a Pest Control certificate that names the work and its edition number, and the edition number on the print should match it exactly.

Condition matters too, more than the auction data can show, because a red balloon on white paper shows every mark and every trace of sun. And if you are comparing a signed and an unsigned print, remember the edition sizes: there are four unsigned prints for every signed one, which is a large part of why the gap between them is so wide.

The next one to come up that we know of is an unsigned print, number 225 of 600, at Bonhams in Paris on 28 October, with an estimate of €40,000 to €60,000. Given where the unsigned edition has sold this year, that looks like a cautious estimate, and it will be a useful read on whether the recovery is holding into the autumn.