Conor Harrington valuation
Baroque figure painting collided with graffiti, usually with two men about to fight.
Conor Harrington was born in Cork in 1980, studied at Limerick, and came out of the Irish graffiti scene before moving to London.
What a work by Conor Harrington is worth
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Bio
Conor Harrington was born in Cork in 1980, studied at Limerick, and came out of the Irish graffiti scene before moving to London. The paintings put an academically painted figure — often a man in eighteenth-century military or courtly dress, rendered with real Old Master facility — into a field of spray paint, drips and erasure, so that the historical body is half dissolved by the contemporary surface. The recurring subject is masculine display: duels, standoffs, drinking, posturing. He has painted large murals internationally and shows in London and New York.
The market divides cleanly between unique paintings on canvas or linen, which lead it, and a print output published in editions of around fifty to two hundred, frequently hand-finished with spray paint so that impressions differ. Hand-finishing should be documented, since it is what separates one sheet from another. Signature and numbering are in pencil, with a studio blindstamp on most editions. The canvases combine oil with spray paint and are often deliberately left partly raw, so surface handling and framing history matter.
Limerick, London and the Dulwich mural
Harrington started writing graffiti in Cork as a teenager and graduated from the Limerick School of Art and Design in 2002 before moving to London. In 2013 he was one of the artists invited to paint the Dulwich Outdoor Gallery, a set of murals in the streets around Dulwich Picture Gallery, each based on a Baroque painting in its collection.
He is married to the painter Chloe Early, who also grew up in Cork. For a canvas, the title, the date and the gallery that sold it are what identify it; for a print, the edition number, any hand-finishing and the studio's documentation.
Hoodies, Brick Lane and The Story of Us and Them
Hip-hop took him to graffiti as a teenager, and his first figures were young men in hoodies, which he called an urban uniform, painted in a classical manner among graffiti tags; the military uniforms came later, with a parallel he draws between urban culture and colonialism. He and Chloe Early moved to London in 2004, where a gallery owner told him he would never be accepted, and they share a studio in Brick Lane.
He has painted murals in Belfast, Dublin, Croydon and Beirut, among other places. Watch Your Palace Fall, published by Heni in 2016, gives half its pages to the canvases and half to the street work, with a booklet, Foundations, recording his early graffiti across Ireland. For The Story of Us and Them, at the Heni Gallery in Soho in 2018, he had a red flag and a blue flag made and painted them, with portraits of forgotten generals, for an imaginary nation split into us and them. He paints from photo shoots he stages himself, with brushes, squeegees and fire extinguishers.
Best auction results
- Dance with the Devil £77,500
- Oil and spray paint on linen, 2013 · London · 28 January 2015
- Publicly reported
- The first of his paintings to be offered at auction.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
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.
