Stolen Banksy artwork recovered as two men charged with burglary

Girl with Balloon will be returned to the gallery in London after investigation by Met Police

Banksy painting Girl With Balloon on display at the Grove Gallery in London after it was stolen on Sunday, then recovered and returned to the gallery. PA

A Banksy artwork stolen from a London gallery has been retrieved and will be returned after an investigation by the Metropolitan Police's Flying Squad.

Two men have been charged with burglary after Girl with Balloon was taken on Sunday, the Metropolitan Police said.

Larry Fraser, 47, and James Love, 53, were charged with non-residential burglary and remanded in police custody.

The artwork was taken from the Grove Gallery in New Cavendish Street, west London, at around 11pm on Sunday.

Girl with Balloon was the only item stolen and has now been recovered and will be returned to the gallery, police said.

Banksy animal artworks appear in London – in pictures

Fraser, of Beckton, east London, and Love, of North Stifford, Essex, appeared at Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court on Thursday where they were bailed to appear at Kingston Crown Court on October 9.

Earlier this year, a man was given a two-year suspended prison sentence by a court in France for using a lorry to steal a Banksy stencil from the back of a parking sign in Paris. Mejdi R, 38, a musician, admitted in court that he used an angle grinder in September 2019 to remove part of the sign on which the secretive British artist had depicted a masked rat holding a box cutter.

He claimed he was a friend of Banksy, who had asked him to retrieve the artwork on the sign near the Centre Pompidou arts complex in Paris.

Banksy artworks removed

Girl with Balloon is a series of artworks, with the piece at the west London gallery one of several versions. Another version hit the headlines in 2018 when it partially self-destructed at an auction where it had been sold for £1.1 million ($1.4 million).

The canvas passed through a shredder hidden inside the large frame, leaving the bottom half in tatters and only a solitary red balloon on a white background left untouched. The partially shredded piece, entitled Love Is In The Bin, was sold for £18,582,000 in London by auction house Sotheby’s in October 2021.

This summer, several pieces in Banksy’s animal-themed series were moved for safekeeping, with one defaced hours after it went up. The silhouette of a howling wolf on a satellite dish in Peckham, south-east London, was taken less than an hour after it was confirmed to be authentic. Another piece in his collection, a silhouette of a rhino, was defaced by a man wearing a black balaclava shortly after it went up.

Banksy's piece at London Zoo, which shows a gorilla lifting a shutter and allowing birds and a seal to escape, was removed and replaced with a replica in August. Another artwork, which shows piranhas in a police sentry box on Ludgate Hill, meanwhile, was moved temporarily to Guildhall Yard to keep it safe, the City of London Corporation said.