Banks Violette valuation
American sculptor of glossy black stages, cast salt and fluorescent light, drawing on black metal and true crime.
Banks Violette was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1973, worked as a tattoo artist in his teens and studied at the School of Visual Arts, graduating in 1998, and at Columbia University, where he took his MFA in 2000.
What a work by Banks Violette is worth
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Bio
Banks Violette was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1973, worked as a tattoo artist in his teens and studied at the School of Visual Arts, graduating in 1998, and at Columbia University, where he took his MFA in 2000. His sculptures and installations are large, monochrome and highly finished: polished black stages and platforms, scaffolding, fluorescent tubes, smashed instruments and forms cast in salt or resin, set out like the aftermath of a performance. They draw on punk and black metal, on the church burnings and murders of the Norwegian black metal scene, and on real crimes, presented through traces and relics rather than images. His first museum exhibition, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2005, placed the ruin of a burned-out church on a black stage. He also makes precise, photographic graphite drawings, and in the 2010s stepped back from exhibiting for several years before showing new work again.
The installations are large, built of industrial materials and sometimes designed for one space, so the components, the installation instructions and any certificate should travel with the work. Cast salt is fragile and reacts to humidity, and black lacquered and reflective surfaces show every scratch, so condition is a large part of value. The graphite drawings, on paper, come up more often than the sculpture. Gladstone Gallery, Team Gallery and Thaddaeus Ropac have shown him.
Ithaca, the Whitney and black metal
He was in the Whitney Biennial of 2004, the year before his solo exhibition there, and has shown at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Migros Museum in Zurich.
His work is in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou.
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