Girl with balloon - Print

A little girl in a black dress stretches out her arm toward a red heart-shaped balloon that floats away on an invisible breeze. Rendered almost entirely as a crisp silhouette against a flat gray background, the picture has the clean, sprayed-edge look of a stencil, which is Banksy's signature method for creating his street art quickly and anonymously. The mysterious British artist first painted this scene on a London wall around 2002, and it went on to become one of his most cherished images.

Part of the magic is that nobody can quite agree on what is happening. Maybe the balloon is slipping away for good, or maybe the wind is about to carry it back into her hands. People have read it as a symbol of hope, others as a quiet picture of loss, and Banksy once added the phrase "There is always hope" beside it. The work grabbed headlines all over again in 2018 when a framed original sold at auction for more than a million pounds and then shredded itself through a device hidden inside the frame the moment the hammer fell. That prank was Banksy through and through, flipping a fancy art sale into one of the most jaw-dropping moments the art world has seen in years.