Duncan McCormick valuation
Paints deliberately sunlit daydreams, and has been startling the salerooms with them.
Duncan McCormick was born in Birmingham in 1977, took a foundation year at Bournville College and then a degree in art and drama at St Martin's College, Lancaster, and spent years alternating between painting, theatre work and running his own screen-printing press. The pictures are unashamedly optimistic: childhood holidays at Salcombe Bay recast with the light of California, Scottish mountains reimagined as Alpine, empty streets and gardens held in permanent summer. The shift towards that escapism came with lockdown, after he had married, become a father and moved from London out to rural Shropshire. Morgan Stanley commissioned eleven paintings for its Canary Wharf offices in 2018.
The method is quick and flat — thin acrylic laid on fast, because the spontaneity is the point — which matters for condition, since there is no impasto to hide a scuff and unvarnished acrylic marks easily. What makes this market unusual is its behaviour at auction rather than its size: individual works have repeatedly sold at many multiples of their low estimates, with bidding drawn from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Turkey, Europe and America, and the gap between an average result and the best ones is very wide. Estimates published by salerooms have been a poor guide, which is precisely why a specific work needs looking at rather than a comparable being applied.
What a work by Duncan McCormick is worth
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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.