SEEN

Overview

Seen is Richard Mirando, born in 1961 in the Bronx. He began painting New York subway cars as a boy in the early seventies and kept at it for sixteen years, working with the crew United Artists, whose output is generally reckoned the most prolific and daring of its era. Where other writers painted panels, Seen committed himself to whole car top to bottoms in a lettering style so consistent that it became instantly identifiable from a moving platform. His pieces ran especially on the 2, 5 and 6 lines. He carried on painting trains until the end of the eighties, long after pressure from the transit authority had driven most writers off the system.

That body of work is why he is routinely called the Godfather of Graffiti, and why he appeared in the documentary Style Wars in 1983 and again in its sequel three decades later. It is also why the name carries weight with collectors who never saw a painted train: Seen is one of the very small number of writers whose subway output is treated as a documented historical practice rather than as anonymous vandalism. The Cornell Hip Hop Collection holds a large group of his original drawings and photographs of his work.

From the train to the canvas

In the early eighties he began producing work on canvas, and the transition was quick and successful. He showed alongside Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, and dealers in Europe took him up early: the Yaki Kornblitt Gallery in Amsterdam gave him solo shows from 1982, and Stellweg Seguy in New York followed in 1983. Suntory in Tokyo showed him in 1985 and the Clayton Gallery in New York in 1995. From the turn of the century the pace increased again, with solo exhibitions at Toy Tokyo Gallery in New York in 2003, StolenSpace in London in 2006, Seen City at the Galerie Chappe in Paris in 2007, the Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris in 2010 and Opera Gallery in Paris in 2011. He opened a gallery, later studios, in Paris.

The later work has broadened well past lettering. He has made three dimensional sculpture, mixed media pieces using materials reclaimed from the street, and a series of hand painted subway maps. A substantial part of his recent painting is given over to comic book heroes and other cartoon and pop culture figures rendered in his own hand, which is the register most of his canvases now occupy.

The market and the LLB lot

Seen's auction market is modest relative to his historical importance, which is common for the first generation of New York writers. At Bonhams in London, a canvas from his Mass Transit series, signed and dated on the reverse and worked in stencil and spray paint at roughly sixty by forty five centimetres, made GBP 2,040 including premium in 2008. Canvases in that size and manner remain the core of the market.

The work LLB has offered is a canvas, and the hammer it achieved sits comfortably within the band that his gallery scale paintings occupy. Buyers should note that his output is large and spans four decades, so period, size and subject move the price far more than the name alone.

What to check before buying

Establish the date and the series first: early eighties canvases and the Mass Transit works are the most sought after, while recent comic hero paintings are more plentiful. Look for the signature and date on the reverse, which is his usual practice. Spray paint on canvas from the eighties can be fragile, so ask about flaking, overpainting and any restoration. Finally, be careful with works on paper and prints attributed to him: his imagery has been reproduced extensively on clothing and merchandise, and an unsigned print carries a small fraction of the value of a worked canvas.