Mr Brainwash valuation
The film-maker at the centre of Exit Through the Gift Shop, who then became the artist.
Mr Brainwash is Thierry Guetta, a French-born Los Angeles clothing dealer who spent years filming street artists, including Banksy, and whose footage became Exit Through the Gift Shop in 2010 — a film that ends with Guetta staging an enormous Los Angeles show of his own and selling out.
What a work by Mr Brainwash 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
Mr Brainwash is Thierry Guetta, a French-born Los Angeles clothing dealer who spent years filming street artists, including Banksy, and whose footage became Exit Through the Gift Shop in 2010 — a film that ends with Guetta staging an enormous Los Angeles show of his own and selling out. Whether the whole episode was a genuine transformation or an elaborate joke at the art market's expense has never been settled, and both readings have been good for business. The work itself is unapologetically derivative pop: silkscreened celebrity portraits, spray-painted brand imagery, dripped hearts, broken records and paint cans, produced in volume by a studio team.
Volume is the central fact of this market. Editions are large, unique works are produced in quantity, and the difference between a hand-finished original and a print with spray applied over it is not always obvious in a photograph. Anything sold as unique should carry studio documentation, and the certificate is doing more work here than it does for most artists. Condition matters because much of the output is mixed media on paper or on a found object, and the applied elements — record sleeves, cans, torn paper — lift and shed.
At a glance
- Born
- 1966, Garges-lès-Gonesse
- Movement
- Neo-Pop
Life Is Beautiful, and the thumbprint
Guetta's first solo show, Life Is Beautiful, opened in a former television studio in Hollywood in the summer of 2008 and ran for three months. The following year he made the cover artwork for Madonna's Celebration, her greatest-hits album. Life Is Beautiful has stayed his slogan and the title of later shows.
His prints are signed and numbered, carry his thumbprint, and come with a certificate from his Los Angeles studio whose number matches the print. A print offered without that certificate, or with one whose numbers do not match, should be checked before it is described. Hand-finished impressions and unique works are documented in the same way, and the description on the certificate is what separates one from the other.
Invader, Icons and the Old Sorting Office
Guetta was introduced to street art by his cousin, the artist Invader, in 1999. Life Is Beautiful filled its Hollywood studio with a twenty-foot robot, a pyramid of 20,000 books and a life-size version of Hopper's Nighthawks, and drew some 50,000 visitors. In February 2010 he opened Life Is Beautiful: Icons in a warehouse in New York's Meatpacking District, and the giant spray cans made for that show later became a series of prints.
During the London Olympics in 2012 he filled the Old Sorting Office in the West End with work that included a six-storey Queen Elizabeth II in coronation robes holding a spray can, a year after a solo show at Opera Gallery in London. He painted large murals in memory of 11 September on the Century 21 store opposite the World Trade Center site in 2014 and 2015, and his work has promoted records by Michael Jackson and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
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.
