When Ford returned to his exhibition, Olik entered Artnet, ART-PRICE database. His research has barely resulted in any results. According to Pietruszka, Orik showed his work in the 1970s and early eighties before turning his back in the art market, although he continued to paint greatly in his home, one bedroom apartment in Kensington. For decades, Orlik was financially supported by his parents, who were the workers of factories in Swindon. But they died at the end of the century. After some drilling, Ford at the end appeared as a catalog from a single -rated exhibition in Acoris, a surreal exhibition in Mayfair, since 1972, when he was twenty -five years old. At that time, Acoreris was selling Paul Delvox and Renhi Magrit and Francis Picabia. “It was unusual,” said Ford. “He literally put his middle finger in the art world.”
After a few weeks, take Pietruszka Ford to meet Olik. The artist lived in his old parent’s house, in Swindon, where he was largely confined to a hospital bed on the ground floor. In two rooms on the upper floor, there were hundreds of works: from school artistic drawings and preparatory graphics for coloring to largely achieved large panels that took months in Orleke to complete. Some of the paintings were framed, while others spanned, but most of them were rolled into long cardboard tubes, dozens of which are located on the wall. Some pipes carried a forty -year post stamps. “It was like finding a lost time capsule,” Ford told me. There was a treasury stuffed with catalogs from the works carried out by Goya and other surrealists, along with books on Stanisao and Isbesky, a Polish modernist, and about the Hitler army. (Urik’s parents were refugees from Poland and Belarus; he was born in a two displaced camp, in Germany, in 1947.) Almost all the paintings showed the distinctive and wrapped orchid brush-which he called “excitement”-a method that developed when he was twenty years old.
Ford was convinced that some works belong to a museum. But Orik was not known. He did not sell a picture for forty years, and this made it very difficult to put value on the paintings he lost. (According to the southern housing, the former owner of Orik, all property in his apartment in London was “disposed of” while entering the hospital, in early 2023.) In order to create a market price for the Orik business, Ford suggested an exhibition at a friend exhibition, in London. “I said:” If we will stand in court and put an evaluation on the lost images, then we actually need evidence, “Ford recall.
Last August, five days before the opening of the show, Guardian A news story was published about the rediscovery of Orik. Ford was on his way back from Belfast, where he was filming an episode of “Antiques on the Road”, when his phone began to shine. “Literally, we were getting two electronic messages every ten minutes for twenty -four hours, saying:” We want to buy a picture by Henry Orik. “They all went before opening the doors.” One large, “cannon balloons”, for thirty -five thousand pounds.
During the past eleven months, Orlik boards have received more than two million pounds. During the same period, Ford and the researcher, Sarah Clemence, tried to collect the life of the life of Orik and his career. (A desktop computer has been lost with a detailed catalog for Ollik as it was evacuated.) Some information came from Orlik itself. “It is somewhat fragile,” Ford told me. “We don’t know how much time we got.” It reads one chapter of Orlik’s life as a specific transformation point. In 1980, he moved to New York, where he lived and drew for a period of four years, trying, without success, to establish himself as an artist. Forty years after his departure, the Orik boards were displayed during that period, “The Surrectional Capital: Searching for America.” to open At Kate Oh exhibition, on the seventy -east.
A few weeks ago, I traveled to Marlburo to see the Orlek boards before shipping to New York. It was early on Sunday morning, and Ford arranged it in a warehouse corridor on the edge of the city. Closely, the excitement of Orlik has charming quality, similar to mechanics – separate and separate at the same time. Orik wrote in a document on his work in 1994, which Petroska discovered last December: “I need to move the surface of the image to express the dialogue that I have noticed and the way my soul moves.” Orlik calls its quantum plate – an attempt to photograph both the outer and internal life of things. “The physical culture denies an invisible existence, although everything that exists,” said Orik. “The outside is a dress, a mask. That is why the world today belongs to those who do not have an internal life, the bandits.”
Initially, Ford was tense to work with an artist who had gave up people like him. He said: “Knowing the history that the merchants and agents hated, I was, in fact, I do not want anyone to be very angry with me.” Only recently, Ford learned that the main Urik merchant in the seventies was the actual two -storey sector. The owner of the Accoris Gallery in the name of Anton von Castle went and told the people that he was the Bavarian kings. In fact, a Greek impossible was the name of his birth, Antonius Hachtzeros. In the late 1970s, von Castle went bankrupt. In 1991, he was sentenced to six years in prison for deceiving a British bank out of three million pounds before leaving the French Chato.
According to the Ford and Clemens research, Orik moved to the United States in early 1980, after he sold four pictures to Beverly Cuborn, the wife of James Cuborn, Hollywood actor. Orlik remained in Los Angeles for a while before moving to a municipality in San Rafael, near Sosalito, and arrived in New York at the end of the year. His work became the most animation after he moved to the city. The excitement has become more free and more expressive. One of the big Orlek paintings in New York, “Winos in Central Park” shows some of the characters, who were transferred to musical notes, waving on the horizon at night. In other panels, the city stumbles up, taking the form of metal clouds. It is similar to a self -image, entitled “Cyclops”, a tall edifice in the form of a head, on the point of the explosion.
“Wall Street, New York.”
Orik was not in line with New York. People found rude and aggressive. It was rejected by the exhibition after the exhibition. Ford said: “You see him returning to his studio, and you will get a darker and more fierce board,” Ford said. “It is nearly anger from the New York sharpness.” But there were quieter and more beautiful paintings – full of strange Orlik imagination, sometimes the Prophet. “Wall Street, New York City” is a direct view of the Orlik Apartment Window: A city of excitement, engraved with dead metal lines and balconies. “Al -Tawim”, which he drew between 1982 and 1984, shows a shed spiral that goes off and takes off at the same time, in a valley of the folds of the factions. “There is almost a component of the body within these curves,” said Ford, which is tilted near the cloth. “I mean, you see all kinds of things in its pictures.”
Orlik used to go and sit in Central Park every day. One afternoon he told me in late May: “Everything was a cement, and that was unrealistic.” “All of this was made up by thought. But nature was Central Park, and that was very important.” Orik was sitting in his bed in the hospital, in the front room of the house in Swindon, wearing a yellow T -shirt under a dark Cardigan. Pietruszka and Ford were also there. A picture of the mother of Orik, Lucina, in the excitement, hung over his head. He was sometimes struggling to form words, but he was clear and familiar. When I put an audio recorder down on the table of his bed, Orlik produced one of the glasses of glasses that contain a piece of paper with the word “stroke” written on it, and operated it carefully. He didn’t say why. He had messy hair, white, spiral ball and bright blue eyes. His left -wing iris had a white strip across it, like the horizon line. I asked him if he remembered the feeling of isolation in New York. He said: “No, because I never felt anyone who really understands my work.” “So he was always alone.”
