John Chamberlain valuation
Crushed car bodies into sculpture that reads like Abstract Expressionist painting in three dimensions.
What a work by John Chamberlain 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.
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Bio
John Chamberlain was born in Rochester, Indiana, in 1927, served in the navy, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then at Black Mountain College, where what he actually studied was poetry. From 1957 he began working with the painted steel of scrapped American cars — bumpers, wings, roof panels — crushed, bent and welded into sculpture that kept the factory colour and the chrome. The comparison everyone reached for was de Kooning, and the point was much the same: a mass of colour and torsion arrested at the moment it settles. He worked through foam rubber, crumpled paper, aluminium foil and film at various times and kept returning to the metal. He spent his last years on Shelter Island and died in 2011, a few months before a full retrospective opened at the Guggenheim.
What comes to market ranges from small table-sized pieces to monumental ones, and the surface is the work. The paint is the car manufacturer's, decades old, and cannot be replaced or retouched without destroying the thing being valued, so rust, overpaint, re-welding and replaced elements are what has to be established — and a sculpture that has stood outdoors will show it. The artist's estate is the authority on attribution, and dated studio documentation matters, because the material itself cannot be dated by eye.
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.
