Jerkface
Cartoon characters cut apart and repeated into patterns, on New York walls and canvases.
Jerkface is an anonymous New York artist working since the early 2010s, who takes the most recognisable cartoon characters of the twentieth century — Mickey, Bugs Bunny, Popeye, the Simpsons, Snoopy — and dismantles them into component parts, repeating gloves, eyes, ears and mouths into flat, tightly organised patterns across a wall or a canvas. The characters remain instantly readable and simultaneously unavailable, which is the point: the work is about how thoroughly these images have been installed in everyone. He has painted large murals across New York, Los Angeles and Europe.
This is a young market with a relatively short auction record, and it moves with the wider appetite for character-driven contemporary work. Unique acrylic and spray paintings on canvas lead. Below them sit screenprint editions, usually in runs of fifty to a few hundred, sometimes in multiple colourways and sometimes hand-finished, plus skate decks, prints on wood and collaborative product. Certificates and studio documentation matter, since the artist is anonymous and there is no long-established gallery record to fall back on. Original packaging affects the value of the objects.
If you own a work by Jerkface
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 costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.