Gillian Wearing valuation
Turner Prize winner who asked strangers to write down what they were thinking, and photographs herself in masks of her own family.
Gillian Wearing was born in Birmingham in 1963 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art and at Goldsmiths College, graduating in 1990.
What a work by Gillian Wearing 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
Gillian Wearing was born in Birmingham in 1963 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art and at Goldsmiths College, graduating in 1990. Her work, in photography and video, is about what people show and what they hide. For Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, of 1992 to 1993, she stopped strangers in the street and photographed each holding a sheet of paper on which they had written what was on their mind. In Confess all on video. Don't worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian, of 1994, people who answered her advertisement in Time Out told their secrets to the camera in masks. She won the Turner Prize in 1997 with 60 Minutes Silence, a video of twenty-six people in police uniform that looks at first like a group photograph. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2007.
Most of her work on the market is photographic: prints from the Signs series, the self-portraits in which she wears silicone masks of herself and her family, and later portraits, all made in editions. The edition number, the size and the certificate decide what a print is worth, and a print that comes with its gallery paperwork is far easier to place. Video works are sold as editions too, with their certificates, and come up much less often.
Album, Birmingham and Parliament Square
For Album, made between 2003 and 2006, she had masks of her mother, father, sister and uncle cast in silicone, and of herself at earlier ages, and restaged old snapshots from the family album with herself inside each mask. The Whitechapel Gallery gave her a retrospective in 2012, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York the first North American survey of her work, Wearing Masks, in 2021.
Her public sculptures include A Real Birmingham Family, unveiled outside the Library of Birmingham in 2014, and the bronze statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett unveiled in Parliament Square in 2018, the first statue of a woman there.
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.
