Antony Micallef valuation
Came up through the Lazarides years and turned into one of Britain's most physical painters.
Antony Micallef was born in Swindon in 1975, studied at Plymouth, and came to notice in the 2000s through the Lazarides gallery alongside the street-adjacent generation of that moment — though his work was always painting rather than graffiti.
What a work by Antony Micallef 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.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Antony Micallef was born in Swindon in 1975, studied at Plymouth, and came to notice in the 2000s through the Lazarides gallery alongside the street-adjacent generation of that moment — though his work was always painting rather than graffiti. The later work has moved steadily away from the graphic and towards the physical: thickly loaded, scraped and worked self-portraits and figures in oil, where the paint is pushed to the point of becoming a substance in its own right.
Unique oil paintings are the centre of the market and the heavily impasto surfaces bring real condition considerations — thick paint cracks, sags and takes knocks, and transit is a genuine risk that should be priced into any sale. Works on paper and a body of screenprint editions from the earlier period sit below, and those earlier editions are a different market from the recent paintings. Signature, date and gallery provenance from the Lazarides years are worth establishing on anything from that period.
The BP Portrait Award, Lazarides and Raw Intent
Micallef took second prize in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 2000, the first time he entered, and was taught by John Virtue, a former student of Frank Auerbach. His solo shows with Lazarides ran from It's A Wonderful World in 2006 to Self in 2015, and in 2016 Raw Intent, a series of self-portraits, was shown in Hong Kong with Pearl Lam. His painting was chosen for the cover of Penguin's edition of Camus's The Outsider in 2017, and in 2023 Peter Gabriel used one of his paintings for the single Love Can Heal.
Two print projects from the earlier years are worth knowing about. In 2006 a series of limited-edition lithographs was commissioned for a show in Milan, and in 2008 Tate Britain showed a limited-edition lithograph he made for the fiftieth anniversary of the Curwen Studio, alongside prints by Paula Rego and Mark Hearld. The same year the Royal Academy placed four nickel-plated bronze sculptures of his, Parasite, in the forecourt at Burlington Gardens.
Critical pop, Bethlehem and Kill your idol
His early paintings, which critics called critical pop, set branded and cartoon imagery against Bacon-like smears of flesh. In 2007 he was one of more than thirty artists in Santa's Ghetto in Bethlehem, which raised money for students at Dar al-Kalima College, and he made a body of work from his time behind the separation wall. For AKA Peace at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2012, curated by Jake Chapman for Peace One Day, he reworked a decommissioned AK-47.
London Underground commissioned a panel from him for a Stations of the Cross series and withdrew it at the last minute because of the words Kill your idol at its centre. His Donald Trump, painted on cigarette packets under the Smoking kills warning, was shown in New York in 2016 and carried at the Women's Marches in Los Angeles and Washington after the inauguration. Paul Moorhouse of the National Portrait Gallery wrote on his self-portraits in The Brutality of Appearance.
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.
