Paintings found in a trash can by an American mechanic in 2017 and attributed to Francis Hines, a forgotten artist of the 1970s, will be on display and for sale June 5-11 in New York and Southport.
From May 5th to June 11th, the two American galleries Hollis Taggart, one in Southport and the other in New York, are organizing an exhibition and an auction to highlight about forty works of an atypical journey that has been forgotten (and in which bottom of a garbage can) after the death of their artist. Estimated at several million dollars, they were found accidentally in a dumpster.
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In a barn in Watertown, Connecticut, entrepreneur George Martin made an amazing discovery in 2017 when he put the site up for sale. Large screens, several feet tall and wide, wrapped in plastic lay in a dumpster, destined to go to landfill. But convinced they would please Jared Whipple, one of his mechanic friends, the 47-year-old entrepreneur decided to put them aside to give to him, the Dailymail website reports.
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After the hundreds of dusty movements had been salvaged, the mechanic immediately started researching. According to the American medium CTInsider, they were spread over four years before bearing fruit. The paintings have been attributed to artist Francis Hines, a Washington-born artist known in the United States for his large-scale works and colorful Expressionist canvases, mostly depicting car parts.
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For many curators and experts in art history, Francis Hines was an important artist on the New York scene in the 1970s. Today, like the couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude, he is known for his packaging work. Over the course of his career, the Connecticut artist has wrapped more than a dozen New York buildings, including the arch in Washington Square Park, commissioned by New York University. A work carried out in 1980 that required more than 8000 meters of white polyester fabric to highlight the sometimes critical state of the city’s heritage and to raise funds to restore and clean up this neglected heritage.
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At the time of his death in 2016 from a stroke, artist Jared Whipple’s sons gave permission to keep and sell all of his work. Contacted by a trade outlet, Peter Hastings Falk, art historian and expert, indicated that each canvas could sell for around $22,000. The few drawings found in the dumpster could cost $4,500 a unit, or €4,000. Overall, the sale of the collection could then reach millions of dollars in revenue.
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Artist Francis Hines’ identification work has already begun, because in 2021 the mechanic decided to exhibit the found works for the first time. First at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut, a local institution. A desire that continues with the holding of these two exhibitions in Southport and New York, where only part of the works will be exhibited. “I pulled it out of that dumpster and fell in love with it,” the mechanic confided, before concluding, “My goal is to put Hines in the history books.”