Robert Del Naja (3D) valuation
Painted Bristol's walls as 3D in the 1980s, then co-founded Massive Attack and made its imagery.
Robert Del Naja was born in Brighton in 1965 and grew up in Bristol, where he painted graffiti as 3D in the early 1980s and was part of the Wild Bunch sound-system collective.
What a work by Robert Del Naja (3D) is worth
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Bio
Robert Del Naja was born in Brighton in 1965 and grew up in Bristol, where he painted graffiti as 3D in the early 1980s and was part of the Wild Bunch sound-system collective. Out of that circle came Massive Attack, which he co-founded and for which he has made most of the visual identity, from record sleeves to stage production. His stencil and spray work from the Bristol scene is widely credited as an influence on the generation of the city's street artists that followed, and he has continued to paint and exhibit alongside the music.
Prints and editions make up much of what reaches the secondary market, often tied to Massive Attack releases and tours, alongside a smaller number of canvases and works on paper. With music-related material the line between an artwork and merchandise has to be drawn carefully: a signed, numbered edition from a recognised publisher is a different object from a tour poster, even when the image is the same. Edition details, the publisher and any certificate issued with the print are what establish which is which, and signatures on music-related items warrant particular care.
Spraycan Art, Bombin' and Mezzanine
Del Naja's graffiti appeared in Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff's book Spraycan Art in 1987 and in Dick Fontaine's film Bombin', alongside Goldie. He is counted among those who brought hip hop and graffiti culture from the United States to Bristol in the early 1980s, and Banksy has cited him as an influence.
He co-founded Massive Attack with Grant Marshall, Adrian Thaws and Andrew Vowles, and was the main producer of Mezzanine in 1997 and 1998. In 2012 he began the Battle Box, a project of one-off live events, exhibitions and vinyl releases.
Stencils, Volume and Favoured Nations
He started with stencils as a young punk, after those of Crass and The Clash, and went back to them in 1987 when the style-writing scene looked down on them; a young Banksy saw them on Bristol's walls. Every Massive Attack sleeve carries his work, and since 2003 he has designed the band's lighting shows with United Visual Artists. With UVA and the producer Neil Davidge he made Volume, a field of 48 glowing columns that answered visitors with light and sound, at the V&A in 2006.
At Massive Attack's Meltdown festival on the South Bank in 2008 he hung Favoured Nations, Commonwealth flags recoloured in anarchist red and black, from the ceiling of the Royal Festival Hall. His largest solo show, at the Lazarides gallery in London in May and June 2013, covered more than twenty years of work made for the band, each piece reworked, hand-printed and finished for the exhibition. He is colour blind, and in the early days labelled his spray cans so he could tell them apart.
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