Banksy’s Stolen ‘Girl With Balloon’ Artwork Was Just Recovered After a London Gallery Heist

Thieves suspected of stealing one of Banksy’s best-known paintings from a gallery in London have now been charged by police.

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The British street artist’s famous Girl with Balloon artwork has been recovered after it was looted from the Grove Gallery in the city’s affluent Fitzrovia neighborhood, The New York Post reported . The men, now identified as Larry Fraser and James Love, were seen on surveillance video smashing the front glass doors to bust their way in. They then grabbed the stencil mural, which is said to be worth £270,000 (or $355,000), before darting out and running off down the street.

There’s no word on how or where the cops found the painting, however, it was part of an exhibition at the gallery entitled Banksy’s London Rebellion , which started on August 21 and ran until September 7, according to BBC . The gallery told the outlet that there was £1.8m (or about $2.3 million) worth of art on display at the time of the robbery. Lindor Mehmetaj, the gallery manager, alerted the police on Monday when he arrived and noticed the missing painting.

Both Fraser and Love, aged 47 and 53, respectively, now face burglary charges and remain in police custody. The two had a bail hearing at Wimbledon Magistrates Court on Thursday and are expected to appear in front of a judge on October 9.

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The work in question is just one of many versions of the anonymous artist’s Girl with Balloon to exist. The stencil mural depicts a young girl reaching out toward a red heart-shaped balloon that appears to be floating away in the wind after the string slipped from her hand. The iconic image started making its rounds across London’s Shoreditch neighborhood back in 2002. Then, iterations of the artwork began to appear on the city’s South Bank in 2004 and at Israel’s barrier at the West Bank in 2005.

In 2018, Banksy shredded a framed copy of the painting in a stunt during a live auction at Sotheby’s in London. The highly valuable work had just hammered down for $1.13 million before it self-destructed. “It appears we just got Banksy-ed,” Alex Branczik, the auction house’s head of contemporary art in Europe, said in a statement at the time. The buyer put the popular mural, which was renamed Love is in the Bin , back on the auction block three years later where it fetched a whopping $25.4 million, a new record for the infamous street artist.

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