Brian Eno, the storied musician and certifiable Renaissance man known for his musings related to the arts, sciences, and so on, will sell a cache of paintings for just £500 each (around $666) through his gallery, Paul Stolper, in London. The online sale—starting November 12—follows a two-day performance during which Eno made more than 400 works with stencils, spray paint, and other materials including “found shapes and dried pasta.”
To make the works, Eno set out an array of wooden blocks on a large table in his London studio and overlaid them with stencils and other objects either placed or randomly dropped. He then painted them and removed certain blocks while keeping others for more work as new blank ones were added. “Throughout the process, Eno was picking out pieces as they seemed finished, leaving gaps to be filled with other blocks,” the gallery materials read. “A block stayed in circulation until it ‘got somewhere.’”
Individual Block paintings, measuring around 5 by 7 inches, are priced at £500. Other works comprising assemblages of four blocks together are £3,000 (around $3,900). The sale will be accompanied by an exhibition (from November 14 through January 17) at Paul Stolper, for which Eno has mounted other past shows including one for which he made an illuminated turntable and another that paired some of his light-box works with fluorescent-light pieces by Dan Flavin.
Eno has been in the news of late. The 2024 documentary Eno, directed by Gary Hustwit, told his life story and garnered attention as a “generative” film for which different sections and passages are composited differently for every screening, meaning it can never show the same way twice.
Earlier this year, Eno published What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, a thoughtful, playful, epigrammatic book created in collaboration with artist Bette A. In a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show podcast for the New York Times, Eno talked about the book and many other sundry subjects. About art, he said, “I’ve always thought that art is actually one of the most important things that humans do with their time. In my book, there’s a long list of things that I consider could come under the headline of art. It includes, of course, obvious things like symphonies and photographs and paintings, but it also includes cardigans and jewelry and makeup and tattoos and all the things that humans do that they don’t have to do.”
Brian Eno in his studio in London.
Courtesy Paul Stolper, London
