Edgar Plans

Life and work

Edgar Plans was born in Madrid in 1977 and lives and works in Gijón, on the north coast of Spain. He learned to draw and paint between 1995 and 1997 in the studio of the painter José María Ramos, then took a degree in Art History at the University of Oviedo. His pictures are built from a cast of small characters he calls Animal Heroes, big headed figures with mouse ears and wide eyes, scattered across a heavily worked ground among scribbled words and numbers. The surface reads as a child's drawing at first glance and as a very deliberate one on the second. The subjects run from a private mythology of heroes and villains to blunt commentary on the way societies behave.

Disciplines and how they differ

Three registers, and the distance between them is unusually wide. At the top are the unique paintings, mixed media on canvas or panel, and the large mixed media and collage works on paper. Below them sit the small unique drawings, in pencil, charcoal or crayon, often only a few centimetres across. Below those sit the editions, prints on paper and prints on canvas issued over the last few years. LLB Auction has handled the lower two registers: a pencil drawing of 2021 and two prints of 2025, one of them on canvas. All three sold and the drawing led.

What a specialist examines

The signature reads Plans, normally at the lower right on works on paper and on the reverse with the date on the canvases, and titles are often written into the picture in the artist's own hand along the top edge. Because the drawings are small and the images are heavily reproduced, the first question is always whether a sheet is a drawing or a print of one. A pencil or charcoal line sits in the paper and catches raking light; a printed line does not. On prints on canvas, look at the edges where the image meets the tacking margin, and check whether any hand worked passages have been added over the printed base, because that changes what the object is. Provenance carries more weight than usual for an artist whose market moved this fast in so short a time.

Market position

This is a market that rose very sharply and then fell back. At Phillips in Hong Kong in September 2021 the mixed media canvas Amore of 2019, a metre square, made HKD 1,512,000. Two months earlier, in July 2021, the large mixed media and collage on paper Hero or Villain of 2018 made HKD 1,071,000. In April 2022 a charcoal drawing of 2020 measuring under fifteen centimetres across made HKD 201,600. Against that, an editioned print of 2025, Lil Villains, made GBP 312 at Tate Ward in London in June 2026. The peak figures belong to unique work sold in Hong Kong inside a two year window, the recent print results belong to a different market entirely, and results at this house sit closer to the second than the first. Each figure includes the buyer's premium as the house prints it.

What a seller should have ready

Photographs of the face in raking light, which is the quickest way to establish whether a line is drawn or printed. The reverse in full, since the canvases carry the signature and date there. Exact dimensions in centimetres, because the small drawings and the editions are close in size and easily confused in a photograph. Any edition number and the total edition. The purchase invoice and the name of the gallery it came from, which for this artist is the single most useful document a consignor can produce. And the year, which is often written into the picture itself and should be photographed rather than reported from memory.