Adriana Oliver valuation
Flat pop portraits with the faces turned away, in a palette of three or four colours.
Adriana Oliver was born in Barcelona in 1990 and studied fine art there.
What a work by Adriana Oliver is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Adriana Oliver was born in Barcelona in 1990 and studied fine art there. The paintings use a deliberately restricted flat vocabulary drawn from mid-century advertising and from Pop: figures in acid or pastel colour, rendered with no modelling at all, almost always seen from behind or in profile so that the face is withheld. Sunglasses, swimming caps, hair and hats do the work a face would otherwise do. The absence is the subject — an argument about anonymity and about how much of a person an image actually delivers. She works between Barcelona and Madrid.
A young market that developed quickly through gallery and art-fair sales from the late 2010s, with a short auction record, so recent comparables matter more than usual and provenance to the original gallery is the strongest documentation available. Unique acrylics on canvas and on board lead. There is a print output in editions of around fifty to a hundred and fifty, and some editioned objects. Because the surfaces are large areas of flat matt acrylic, any scuff or retouch is highly visible and difficult to disguise.
An unforgiving surface
The paintings are large fields of flat matt acrylic with no modelling and no varnish, which is the whole of their look and also their weakness. Matt acrylic holds dirt, marks where it is touched, and cannot be retouched invisibly: a repair to a flat colour field shows as a change in sheen even when the colour is matched exactly, because there is no texture to hide the edge of the repair.
So the handling advice is unusually blunt. Do not clean it, do not test a corner, and do not let anybody else. Photograph it square on in daylight without flash, then take a second photograph raking the light across the surface from one side, which is the only way scuffing and earlier retouching become visible. Corners and edges take the damage in transit, so photograph those separately.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
