Like many of Banksy’s works, this image has an official title and one adopted by the public. The one attributable to the British artist is Bomb Love but the public have welcomed the title Bomb Hugger. It is one of the artist’s most popular and iconic images, published in a series of 750 serigraph editions in 2003 by Pictures On Walls - Banksy’s print house in London - in a year which saw great demonstrations in Great Britain in opposition to joint armed intervention with the US against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Against a reassuring pink pop background, a little girl hugs a bomb as though she’s hugging a teddy bear. The artist recounts the version of the war fed to the public in the stories told by the government, backed by the media during those years: carefully curated narratives formed to bathe the notion of war in a positive and reassuring light and justify the attack on Iraq in a war to “export democracy”. In the pages of his 2001 black book, Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, Banksy associates this very image to his aphorism that reads: ‘A wall is a very big weapon, it’s one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with’.

As is typical of Banksy, this image has been reproduced by the artist in various formats on numerous occasions, appearing on walls throughout Europe in cities like Berlin, often being created with the distinctive stencilling technique but also distributed in leaflet form to the public during anti-military protests across Great Britain. Although the image originally dates back to 2000, Banksy’s archive includes some 2003 monochrome stencil reproductions of “Bomb Hugger” on public facing walls in East London and later, Brighton. In his 2004 black book Cut it Out Banksy reunites bombs and hugs, writing: “Suicide bombers just need a hug”.