Hephaestus Analytical, a London-based tech company that authenticates artworks by using AI, provenance research, and advanced chemical analysis, has acquired scientific art analysis firm ArtDiscovery.
ArtDiscovery’s extensive pigment database, spectral libraries, and expert team of conservators will enable Hephaestus “to unlock new possibilities in art authentication, making it more precise, accessible, and impactful than ever,” the merged companies’ CEO, Denis Moiseev, told ARTnews.
He said the merger will lead to the “world’s highest evidentiary standards in art authentication.”
Founded in 2009, ArtDiscovery has worked with the FBI, Sotheby’s, leading museums, and art dealers to verify artworks. “Joining Hephaestus feels like we are catching up with the digital world,” Nica Gutman Rieppi, the company’s managing director, said in a statement. “Working with Hephaestus does not so much alter our rigorous application of scientific standards as it accelerates them. We are now able to research across our vast provenance, imaging and pigment libraries, conduct chemical analyses, and provide our customers with definitive answers, all in less time and with even greater accuracy than before.”
Hephaestus, which is also headquartered in New York, has a specialization in the Russian avant-garde, an umbrella term for modernism that flourished in other Soviet nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Moiseev appeared in the BBC documentary “The Zaks Affair: Anatomy of a Fake Collection” last year demonstrating his company’s authentication technology. He told ARTnews that more than 95 percent of the Russian avant-garde paintings brought to him are fake.
“The market is so saturated with forgeries that it’s impossible not to talk about it,” Moiseev said. “We believe our technology can clean up the market. It is a solvable problem. The issue is that there’s an adversarial component to the Russian avant-garde market—there are so-called experts who are authenticating or contributing to the authentication—of forgeries. There are people who say things are real and actually, they’re not. This is what makes this market so complicated, but it really shouldn’t be.”
Hephaestus is also developing blockchain technology to increase security surrounding authentications and creating products for art finance and securitisation.
“Our commitment to eliminating forgery from the art markets led us to develop our proprietary AI protocols (Pictology) and blockchain-secured records,” Moiseev added. “When presented with the opportunity to integrate this service with the decades-long research on pigments maintained by ArtDiscovery, we realised this was a win-win situation for the art world. We are redefining the standard of certainty for art collectors, galleries, museums and even law enforcement, worldwide.”
