Previously Unseen Banksy Sells in New York for $18m

News / Fairs and Auctions $85.7m Rothko Leads First Night of New York Sales Philippa Kelly

Banksy’s Girl With Balloon on Found Landscape (2012) has sold at auction in New York for just shy of $18 million USD (£13.4 million), becoming one of the notorious street artist’s most expensive works to date.

The painting, which had never previously been seen in public, was sold on Wednesday by the members-only online auction platform Fair Warning. The invite-only sale took place in a private space above Tiffany & Co’s Manhattan store. 

Speaking to Artnews ahead of the widely publicised sale, Fair Warning founder Loïc Gouzer said: “It is becoming clear that Banksy is probably one of the most consequential artists of our time.”

“It’s hard since within the art world, you’re not supposed to like Banksy because the art world didn’t make him—he’s the only artist who made himself,” he added.

The work sold to an anonymous phone bidder for a total of $17,940,000 (with fees), just a sliver below its ambitious high estimate of $18 million, becoming the third-highest-priced Banksy to be sold at auction.

It is the first major Banksy to head to auction since the artist’s identity was “revealed” by Reuters earlier this year. The news agency identified the political graffiti artist as a Bristol-based man named Robin Gunningham, though this has not been confirmed by Banksy or his organisation, Pest Control Office.

Girl With Balloon on Found Landscape is a reworking of a pastoral scene, to which the artist has added one of his most recognisable motifs.

Girl with Balloon first appeared on a London wall in 2002. It has since been replicated across some of the artist’s most famous works, including Love is in the Bin (2018), the famously semi-shredded work that sold at Sotheby’s in 2018 for $25.4 million USD (£18.9 million), setting the artist’s current auction record.

Game Changer (2020), a painting of a child dressed as a nurse that was unveiled during the Covid-19 pandemic, sold at Christie’s in London in 2021 for $23.1 million USD (£17.2 million), with proceeds donated to charities supporting UK health workers.

The sale follows a busy week of auction action in New York City, during which Christie’s netted more than $1bn USD (around £821.4 million) from two back-to-back sales and Sotheby’s saw success with works by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Jean-Michel Basquiat, signalling cause for optimism at the very top of the market.