Jerkface valuation
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.
What a work by Jerkface 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.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
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.
Queens, the School of Visual Arts and the murals
Jerkface grew up in Queens, drawing cartoon characters as a child and painting graffiti as a teenager, and studied graphic design and advertising at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Around 2012, unable to get into other people's group shows, he began curating his own, in Long Island City and Crown Heights.
His first solo exhibition, Cartoon Villain, was at Under the Bridge Gallery in New York in 2014. Over the Influence showed him in Hong Kong in 2016 and in New York in 2017, Taglialatella Galleries in New York in 2018 and Maddox Gallery in London in 2021. His murals, some of them several storeys high, are in New York, in other American cities and in Hong Kong.
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.
