Karen Kilimnik valuation
Scatter installations of photocopies, clothes and drawings, then small paintings of celebrities in the manner of the Old Masters.
Karen Kilimnik was born in Philadelphia in 1955 and studied at Temple University there.
What a work by Karen Kilimnik is worth
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Bio
Karen Kilimnik was born in Philadelphia in 1955 and studied at Temple University there. She made her name at the end of the 1980s with installations spread across the floor: The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers, of 1989, gathered photocopied images, clothing, drawings and other objects around the 1960s television series, and the scatter style of works like it made her one of the artists critics grouped as slacker art in the early 1990s. Her paintings, loose, brightly coloured and knowingly amateurish, borrow the look of the Old Masters and fill it with celebrities, as in her portrait of Hugh Grant of 1997. She has shown with 303 Gallery in New York since the early 1990s, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia organised her first museum survey in 2007, which travelled to Chicago and Aspen. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Paintings, mostly small, on canvas or board, and works on paper are what come to market; the installations rarely do, and when they do the artist's own instructions and the gallery's records are part of the work. Because the paintings are meant to look clumsy, judging them by eye is harder than usual, and provenance through 303 Gallery or the other galleries that have shown her matters. Drawings on cheap paper, photocopies and collage held with tape discolour and fade, so condition needs checking in good light.
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.
