Ben Eine valuation
Painted the alphabet onto shopfront shutters, one letter per shop, down whole London streets.
Ben Eine was born in London in 1970 and spent years as a graffiti writer before moving to letterforms as the whole subject rather than the signature.
What a work by Ben Eine is worth
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Bio
Ben Eine was born in London in 1970 and spent years as a graffiti writer before moving to letterforms as the whole subject rather than the signature. He printed for Banksy at Pictures on Walls, then began painting single capital letters in circus and Victorian display faces onto the roller shutters of East London shops — a letter per shutter, so that a street spelt something when the shops were shut. Middlesex Street became the alphabet. In 2010 David Cameron gave Barack Obama one of his Twentyfirst Century City canvases, which took the work abruptly into a wider public view.
The market is led by paintings on canvas and by the hand-painted panels and shutters, with a very large output of screenprints beneath them, published in editions typically of fifty to three hundred and often in several colourways of the same word. Colourway and edition size are what separate otherwise identical sheets. Signature, numbering and the date are normally in pencil in the margin. Because the work is essentially flat blocks of saturated colour, fading and any surface abrasion are immediately visible and are the main condition concerns.
Middlesex Street, and the White House
In May 2010 Eine painted the whole alphabet onto the shop shutters of Middlesex Street in East London, which residents took to calling Alphabet Street. In July that year the Prime Minister, David Cameron, gave President Barack Obama a painting by Eine, Twenty First Century City, as the official British gift.
Before that he had worked from a print workshop above a bar on Leonard Street in Shoreditch and helped set up Pictures on Walls, printing editions for other artists. For one of his own screenprints, the word, the colourway and the edition number identify it.
Tenderloin, White Walls and OurTypes
Eine was born Benjamin Flynn on 23 August 1970. At Pictures on Walls he pulled editions for Jamie Hewlett, Mode2, Modern Toss and David Shrigley as well as for Banksy, and in 2008 he left to work for himself. His letters come in named styles, among them Shutter, NewCircus, Neon, Elton, Vandalism, Tenderloin and Wendy. His show at White Walls in San Francisco in March 2011 sold out before it opened, and that spring he was in Art in the Streets at MOCA in Los Angeles.
The typographer Chank Diesel released Tenderloin with him as a free font in 2012, and in 2013 Edition House and Nelly Duff published Tenderloin A-Z, a silkscreen in 52 colours. Amnesty International asked him for its fiftieth-anniversary poster in 2011. In 2019 he set up OurTypes, a studio for lettering and typefaces that released his New Circus font, and in 2020 he designed a pod for the London Eye's twentieth anniversary, the year Central Saint Martins named a classroom after him.
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