Faile valuation
A Brooklyn duo who built a chapel, an arcade, and a visual language out of pulp printing.
Faile is Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, working together from Brooklyn since the late 1990s, whose vocabulary comes from pulp paperbacks, comic panels, advertising and religious printing, layered and re-layered through stencil, screenprint and wheatpaste.
What a work by Faile is worth
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 is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Faile is Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, working together from Brooklyn since the late 1990s, whose vocabulary comes from pulp paperbacks, comic panels, advertising and religious printing, layered and re-layered through stencil, screenprint and wheatpaste. The projects have grown well past pictures on walls: the Temple installation, the Deluxx Fluxx arcade of playable modified machines, and large painted wooden constructions that behave as objects rather than as paintings.
Unique works — paintings on wood, layered paste-ups, prayer wheels and boxes — sit above a substantial body of screenprint editions, and the editions themselves come in many variants with hand-finishing, overprinting and different substrates. That variation is where the valuation work is, since two sheets of the same image can be considerably apart. Condition on the wooden and mixed-media pieces should be judged against how they were made, which is deliberately distressed; separating original surface from later damage takes a proper look.
Edmonton, Minneapolis and the early books
Patrick McNeil was born in Edmonton in 1975 and Patrick Miller in Minneapolis in 1976, and the two met as boys in Arizona. They began working together as Faile in 1999, at first with the artist Aiko Nakagawa, and spent the early 2000s putting work up on the streets from Manhattan to London and Tokyo, influenced by Shepard Fairey, Bast and WK Interact.
By 2004 they had published several limited-edition books, among them Orange, Death, Boredom and Lavender, and they collaborated on clothing and shoes with Paper Denim, Comme des Garçons and Pro-Keds.
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.
