Joe Tilson valuation
British Pop artist who worked as a carpenter first, and never stopped making objects rather than pictures.
Joe Tilson was born in London in 1928, trained and worked as a carpenter before national service and the Royal College, where he overlapped with Blake, Hockney and Kitaj.
What a work by Joe Tilson is worth
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Bio
Joe Tilson was born in London in 1928, trained and worked as a carpenter before national service and the Royal College, where he overlapped with Blake, Hockney and Kitaj. The carpentry stayed: his Pop works of the 1960s are constructed wooden reliefs, ziggurats, boxes and letter-forms in bright industrial colour rather than paintings of consumer imagery. From the 1970s he moved decisively away from Pop towards a long engagement with mythology, alchemy, Greek and Italian sites and Venetian architecture, working in Wiltshire and in Italy. He was elected a Royal Academician and died in 2023.
The 1960s constructed reliefs and the Pop-period screenprints lead this British market. The wooden constructions are painted objects and are vulnerable at the edges and corners, with colour loss difficult to retouch invisibly. Tilson was an outstanding and prolific printmaker across six decades — screenprints, woodcuts, and editions incorporating collage and applied materials — published in editions of around fifty to two hundred and fifty, and these are what most owners hold. The later Venetian and mythological series are extensive and more modestly valued.
Rome, Venice and the Royal Academy
Tilson served in the RAF from 1946 to 1949, then studied at Saint Martin's and the Royal College of Art, and in 1955 won the Rome Prize to the British School at Rome. His first one-man show was at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1962, and after he showed at the Venice Biennale in 1964 the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam gave him a retrospective.
After moving to Wiltshire in 1972 he began the Alchera works in stone, straw and rope, drawing on pre-classical myth. He later showed with Waddington Galleries and the Alan Cristea Gallery, and the Royal Academy gave him a retrospective in 2002. The prints are catalogued in Enzo Di Martino's Tilson, The Printed Works 1963–2009. He died at Cortona in November 2023, aged 95.
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