Girl with Balloon
The most recognised image the artist has made, and for that reason the one where buyers most often pay for the picture rather than the example. The gap between the cheapest and the dearest Girl with Balloon is enormous, and almost none of it is visible in a photograph.
Pictures on Walls · 2004
Edition summary
| Year | 2004 |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Pictures on Walls |
| Medium | Screenprint on paper |
| Signed edition | Reported as 150 |
| Unsigned edition | Reported as 600 |
| Variants | Multiple colourways and artist's proofs recorded separately, several extremely scarce |
| Authentication | Pest Control certificate required to transact |
Unverified — Edition figures are compiled from publicly circulated references and have not been verified against primary records. Confirm against Pest Control and publisher records before relying on them for a transaction.
Four Girl with Balloons, four different markets
More than most images in the artist's output, this one exists in tiers that behave almost independently of each other.
Unsigned in the standard colourway is the largest group and the entry point — plentiful relative to demand, and where the correction after 2021 bit hardest. Signed in the standard colourway is a far smaller edition at a substantial premium, and is the tier most people picture when they say “a Girl with Balloon”. Rare colourways are small runs that trade well above the standard signed edition, so which colourway you own can matter more than whether it is signed. Artist's proofs and special editions sit at the top by a distance: a gold artist's proof was reported at £1.1 million in 2021.
The shredding, and what it did and did not do
The work shredded at auction in 2018 was a framed canvas, not a screenprint. It was renamed Love Is In The Bin and sold for a reported £18,582,000 in October 2021 — the highest figure recorded for any Banksy.
That event lifted attention across the entire market, prints included. What it did not do is make any individual screenprint of this image scarcer. If a seller is pricing an unsigned example off an £18.6m canvas headline, that is a story rather than a comparable.
Before you buy or sell one
- Establish the tier first — signed status, colourway, proof designation — before discussing price at all.
- Check the sheet measures full size. Trimming is common on prints this widely handled, and permanently costly.
- Confirm the Pest Control certificate corresponds to this edition number specifically.
- Compare against examples in the same tier, never against the headline canvas results.
Keep reading
- Love Is In The Air
- Di-Faced Tenner
- Rude Copper
- What the reported figures actually show
- Pest Control authentication explained
Edition data on this page is unverified as noted above, and no work described here is offered for sale. Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with Banksy, Pest Control, Pictures on Walls or any auction house. Only Pest Control can authenticate a work by Banksy. Nothing here is investment or legal advice.
Own one? Send three photographs and we will tell you which tier yours sits in.