I find what
others walk past.

The Story

I go where most people don’t look twice: house-clearance auctions, flea markets, and every so often the thrift shop. Boxes of “just old paintings”, crates of prints, the frame nobody bid on. Most of it is nothing. But every so often something is quietly wrong for the pile it’s in — better, older, stranger — and I have learned to trust that feeling.

That is where my work really is: seeing it. Spotting the one object in the room that doesn’t belong there, and then chasing down what it actually is — the signature, the technique, the paper, the label on the back, the auction records nobody reads.

I am honest about the limits of that. I don’t authenticate, and I don’t hand out guarantees — I haven’t got the years behind me for that, and I’d rather say so than pretend. When a find deserves a firmer word than mine, I bring in the specialists who can give it. What you get from me is the discovery and the research, doubts included.

More than 800 works have been sold this way, and many times that number have passed through my hands on the way. This is a record of the ones worth telling.

— Mark de Vos, Old Fox Gallery