Invader valuation

Four quite different kinds of object arrive under this name, and they are not variations on one another. Aliases are studio mosaics made to correspond to a particular street installation and tied to that piece’s reference code. Rubikcubist works are built from Rubik’s cubes rather than tiles. Invasion Kits are boxed, editioned sets from which a mosaic can be assembled. And there are the prints, which is what most people who write to us own.

The street mosaics themselves are the reason for all of it and are almost never the thing an owner holds. That gap — between the work that made the name and the work that trades — is wider here than for almost any other artist we are asked about, and it is the source of most of the confusion we see.

This is the whole ballgame for an Alias. Each one corresponds to a numbered street piece and carries that piece’s code, and the certificate issued with it is what ties the object in front of you to that record. Keep the two together. An Alias separated from its paperwork is in real difficulty whatever it is, because there is no way to put the connection back.

There is no Pest Control equivalent in this market — no third-party body that will examine a work after the fact and rule on it. The documentation issued at the point of sale is the entire evidence, which is why we ask for it before anything else and why we would rather see a photograph of the certificate than of the work.

An official catalogue raisonné of the prints on paper exists and documents the editions made between 2001 and 2020. Checking a sheet against it settles most of what a seller needs to know at once: which edition it belongs to, what it should measure, how many were made, and whether yours is one of the signed ones.

On the sheet itself, look at the pencil signature, the numbering and the margins. A print trimmed to fit a frame has usually lost the numbering and sometimes the signature too, and with them the evidence of which edition it is — which is a condition problem and an identification problem at the same time. Photograph the whole sheet, margins included, rather than the image alone.

Pieces prised off buildings come up regularly and carry three problems at once: who owned the wall, what the removal did to the work, and the artist’s own publicly stated hostility to their sale. None of that makes such a piece unsaleable. It does change the route to market, the disclosure required and what a buyer will pay, and all three are better settled before anything is consigned than discovered afterwards.

The tile works are among the more heavily copied things in this field, for the obvious reason that ceramic tile is available to anybody. Re-tiled and repaired pieces are a separate question again, and a legitimate work that has been patched is not the same proposition as one that has not. Photographs of the reverse, the edges and the fixing are worth as much to us as photographs of the front.

The front, the reverse and the edges in daylight; the full sheet including margins if it is a print; the certificate and reference code if there is one; the original invoice, confirmation email or gallery receipt if you still have it; and the measurements. If the paperwork is lost, say so rather than leaving it out — it is a common situation and it is better addressed at the start than halfway through a consignment.