Exciting auction victory funds art programme!

Understanding the value of your current art collection could be key in the development of creating an engaging and dynamic art programme.

We were recently engaged by an international law firm to advise on artwork for their new building, which we commenced with an audit and valuation of their existing collection. As well as arranging a staff charity auction, we took several pieces to external auction, which delivered an incredible result! The most notable of these pieces was Denzil Forrester’s painting ‘Sewing Machine’ which went for £85,000 and subsequently helped fund a five year rent-to-purchase exhibition programme and wide-reaching creative events programme.

Through a comprehensive audit and valuation process, Art Acumen help clients gain insight into the unique qualities of their passive collections, their stored value and opportunities to utilise this value to create an updated more relevant and engaging art programme for the workplace. Our 20 years’ experience and long standing relationships with auction houses and specialist dealers enable us to deliver professional and reliable audit and valuation reports, with clear routes to market; the first step in helping shape a client’s new art programme.

All our art programmes are bespoke – responding to each company’s unique culture – and designed to support wellbeing, nurture innovation and build engagement through diverse changeover exhibitions, collaborative commission and creative events.

Denzil Forrester (MBE) is known for capturing the rhythms of London’s reggae, dub, and dancehall clubs of the 1980s as well as documenting black British culture and the West Indian community during the 1980s and 1990s.

Painted in vivid colours, ‘Sewing Machine’ is an autobiographical diorama depicting the Grenada-born artist’s family sewing bags. Having just moved from Grenada aged eleven, he’d had to wait six months before he could start school. During that period, and for a while after, he helped his mother sew bags in the basement of their Stoke Newington home. They’d work until late, a few nights a week, ‘everything revolved around bags’, he remembers. To keep him sweet, his mother would buy him the latest Bob Marley album, ‘it kept me sewing’.