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Auction PR Publicity Announcements News and Information

Geveaway Artist Artworks for Bonhams Auction

A painting by Adam Neate, an artist who is known to have left his works leaning against lamp posts and dustbins is to be sold at Bonhams East Anglian View sale in Bury St Edmunds on 3rd December. Previously his work has sold for as much as £80,000.

Adam NeateLeaving his paintings for anyone who wanted them, Adam Neate found fame after distributing his work at night about the streets of London. By 2005 these ‘found’ works were exchanging hands on e-Bay for high prices. Not only had Neate found rapid success but also cemented his place in Art History by becoming one of the first artists to be ‘discovered’ online. In 2007, buoyed by the clamour for his work, his painting ‘The Suicide Bomber’ sold for £78,500 at auction.

Dubbed the ‘Banksy of East Anglia’, Neate grew up in Ipswich and studied graphic art at Suffolk College before joining a London advertising agency. From an early age he immersed himself in hip-hop culture and, over time, developed his unique spray-paint style.

Neate tried to save money by working on scraps of card and became so prolific that he had a surplus of work, initially he left paintings as donations outside charity shops, but, upon discovering that these were often thrown away he hit upon a unique solution.

In Bonhams ‘The East Anglian View’ auction Neate’s work Optimus Prime is to be sold and is estimated to fetch £3,000-5,000. It will hang alongside works by more traditional artists such as Sir Alfred Munnings, Sir Edward Seago and Leonard Squirrell. The painting on a flattened cardboard box is one of Adam Neate’s earliest works to come to auction and was sourced in Ipswich from a friend of the artist who shared a flat whilst both were at Suffolk College in the 1990s.

Bonhams East Anglian picture specialist, Daniel Wright, insists there are more works to be found: “This is the third Adam Neate painting which we have sold in the past year, the previous two sold for a combined total approaching £10,000 and were also from a college friend of the artist. Adam Neate’s generosity is well documented and coupled with his prolific output we suspect there are many further works in the Ipswich area, quite possibly in the hands of people who are unaware of the value of the items they possess.”

www.bonhams.com/bury