A man has been sentenced to 13 months in prison by a British court for stealing a print of street artist Banksy’s iconic Girl with Balloon from a London gallery in September last year.
Larry Fraser, 49, was jailed on Friday by a judge in southwest London after he pleaded guilty to the smash-and-grab burglary of the elusive artist’s painting, valued at 270,000 pounds ($355,200).
Despite trying to conceal his identity with a mask, Fraser was caught on camera, and police tracked him down two days after the theft. The artwork was recovered shortly afterwards, according to London’s Metropolitan Police.
“This is a brazen and serious non-domestic burglary,” said Judge Anne Brown, passing the sentence at Kingston Crown Court.
The Girl with Balloon first appeared on the streets of London’s Shoreditch neighbourhood in 2002, with Banksy creating versions of the painting on London’s South Bank in 2004 and in the occupied West Bank in 2005.
One version of the painting shredded itself into pieces the moment after it was sold for more than one million British pounds ($1.3m) by London auction house Sotheby’s in 2018.
Detective Chief Inspector Scott Mather said: “Banksy’s ‘Girl with Balloon’ is known across the world – and we reacted immediately to not just bring Fraser to justice but also reunite the artwork with the gallery.”
Banksy’s paintings in Palestine
The secretive British street artist has returned to Palestine on multiple occasions to create artworks, including a version of the girl with the red balloon.
In 2005, he sprayed nine stencilled images at different locations along the illegal, eight-metre-high (26-foot) separation wall that Israel has constructed in the occupied West Bank.
They included a ladder reaching over the wall, a young girl being carried over it by balloons and a window on the grey concrete showing beautiful mountains in the background.
A Palestinian boy looks at one of six images painted by British street artist Banksy as part of a Christmas exhibition in the occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem in December 2007 [File: Ammar Awad/Reuters]
In 2007, he painted a number of artworks in Bethlehem, including a young girl frisking an Israeli soldier pinned up against a wall.
In February 2015, he allegedly sneaked into the Gaza Strip through a smuggling tunnel and painted three works on the walls of Gaza homes destroyed in Israeli air strikes during the previous year’s conflict.
In 2017, he opened the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, just four metres from Israel’s separation wall.
Earlier this year, authorities attempted to scrub a Banksy painting on a London court wall that depicted a judge hitting a protester and was believed to refer to the country’s crackdown on the Palestine Action protest group.
Banksy rose to fame for sharply ironic outdoor graffiti with political themes. Once a small-time graffiti artist from the English city of Bristol, his artwork has become hugely popular worldwide and valuable.
