James McQueen

McQueen, born in 1977, works from source material that was mass-produced before he touched it. Vintage advertising, drinks and tobacco packaging, society portraiture, the visual grammar of a brand that wants to be trusted — reworked at scale in oil and mixed media, with the original lettering either kept, defaced or replaced by a line that says what the advertisement was actually selling. The special-edition label reading NOBODY GETS OUT SOBER is the method in one object. That the sources are printed matters commercially as well as critically, because the studio issues the same images as unique paintings and as editions, and those are not the same thing to own.

The question owners arrive with is almost always the same one: is what I have unique? It is a harder question here than it looks. Editions are frequently hand-finished — paint, spray, gold leaf or applied elements added to a printed sheet after it comes off the press — so no two impressions are identical, and in a photograph a hand-embellished print and a painting are very difficult to tell apart. The answer is not in the surface. It is in the certificate, the pencil numbering and the studio's own record of what was published, and those are what a valuation asks for first.

There are ninety-six lots on the auction record, and they are set out in full under Auction results above. Two things in that record matter more than the top price. Not one lot sold below its low estimate, and just under half went above the high one, which is an unusually clean run and says the estimates were set conservatively. And the median is two thousand pounds against a top lot of £8,125 — a market that trades in the low thousands with a thin tail, rather than one with a headline and a long shadow. That is the range a reserve has to be set inside, and it is why the conversation is worth having before a work is consigned rather than after.

So what decides value here is duller and more specific than a headline. Which edition a sheet belongs to and how large that edition was. Whether it is one of several colourways. Whether the hand-finishing is present and matches the documentation. Whether the certificate is with the work — separated from its paperwork, an embellished edition is a materially harder sale. And condition, which is less forgiving than it looks: these are layered surfaces combining oil, spray and printed or transferred ground, they age unevenly, they should not be varnished, and applied elements lift.