Ben Eine
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. 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.
If you own a work by Ben Eine
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 costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.