Joe Tilson
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. 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.
If you own a work by Joe Tilson
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.