Original Paintings from Pink Floyd’s The Wall On Sale for the First Time!

Image © Gerald Scarfe, All Rights Reserved

Multimillion-Dollar Collection of Masterworks Created for the Album, 

Concerts and Film, From the Private Collection of Gerald Scarfe

San Francisco, CA, March 7, 2017: San Francisco Art Exchange LLC (SFAE) has been selected to exclusively represent the most valuable collection of rock and roll artwork ever to be offered for sale: eleven original paintings created and hand-selected by famed English artist Gerald Scarfe, from Pink Floyd’s 1982 masterpiece The Wall. A major exhibition will be held July 2017 with Scarfe in attendance at the invitation-only premier to be held at SFAE’s gallery (458 Geary St, San Francisco, CA).  Details to be announced.

The paintings being offered have been carefully selected by Scarfe as his most important works, and include several of the most famous images in rock history due to their association with The Wall. Among the paintings are the true definitive originals for iconic artworks such as The Scream, Wife With Flaming Hair, Giant Judge and Hammers, The Mother, Education For What? No Jobs!, The Wife's Shadow, One of The Frightened Ones, The Gross Inflatable Pig, Comfortably Numb, and The Teacher, as well as the massive original storyboard created for the film which incorporates 50 original renderings.

To view available artworks, including in-depth descriptions and histories, please CLICK HERE

Epic in scale and steeped in rock history, these original works of art are marquis collectibles for major individual, corporate, and institutional collectors. Due to the extensive distribution of the imagery via album, live-performances, music-videos, and the film (along with the accompanying publicity), the artwork offered is among the most instantly recognizable and significant in pop culture.

One of the paintings available for purchase, Giant Judge and Hammers, will be prominently on display in London beginning May 13, 2017 as part of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s eagerly anticipated The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains, the first international retrospective of one of the worlds’ most ground-breaking and influential bands.  This museum exhibition is expected to become one of the most successful on record.  

The Wall album topped Billboard charts for 15 weeks, and in 1999 was certified 23 x Platinum. It remains one of the best-selling albums of all time, selling over 19 million copies between 1979 and 1990 in the US alone. The film was critically acclaimed when it was released in 1982 and won BAFTAs for Best Original Song and Best Sound. Scarfe developed the film's entire visual environment before the project began and his characters became a mixture of live-action and animated imagery, all of which played an integral role in the surreal narrative.

Gerald Scarfe is one of the world's most famous political cartoonists and caricaturists whose work has been seen in The Sunday Times and The New Yorker for decades.  His artworks reside in the following permanent collections, among others: Tate Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and The Parliamentary Art Collection in London, as well as the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

San Francisco Art Exchange is the sole gallery authorized to sell these paintings. San Francisco Art Exchange is known worldwide for record-breaking sales of album cover related artwork, and has represented such revered artworks as the originals for Abbey Road, Meet The Beatles, Rubber Soul, Imagine, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Ummagumma, Animals, Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, The Best of The Doors, Candy-O, and many, many more.

For sales and inquiries, please contact San Francisco Art Exchange sales@sfae.com or call 415-441-8840.

For more information:

http://www.sfae.com/ 

Media Contact:                                       

Michael Jensen and Erin Cook                                                

Jensen Communications                                               

626.585.9575                                                                               

mj@jensencom.com / erin@jensencom.com    

The Merger of Music and Image

Pink Floyd, Division Bell ©Copyright Protected.

During the past half century or more, music and visual image have been fused together so that they are now inseparable. Hearing the first few bars of a song does not only “unfold” the whole song’s identity, its meaning and its presence in our consciousness. Those same few bars also evoke the images we directly associate with the song itself. 

Whether the visual prompt is the artwork that appears on the cover of an album or a picture of the performer(s) who recorded a song, our minds generate music and image simultaneously. One might hear a song and our mind immediately provides a picture of cover art of the album the song is on. Or one might catch sight of an album cover, Abbey Road for example, or Dark Side of the Moon, and a reservoir of songs will begin playing from our memories. We might even begin unconsciously humming a song from an album long after seeing its cover image.

Yes, Tales from Topographic Oceans ©Roger Dean

Most of us have favorite musicians or bands. The images we associate with them and their music become synonymous and interconnected and they become endowed with a personal kind  of magnetism, a gravitational force that draws us into our imaginations. Whether in the form of a photographic portrait or the cover of an album, like the DNA that is woven through the music and image, it extends in some way to our own lives and experiences, what we value, who we are, how we see ourselves. 

We offer one of the most impressive collections, the best of the best, of the faces and images of Rock, Jazz, Blues, Hip Hop and other forms of music that binds our culture together. The reason we have embraced this kind of iconography and make it part of who we are and what we do at our downtown San Francisco gallery as well as on our website is because music and the symbols it gives birth to are intrinsically part of our lives as, by definition, they are part of our cultural environment. Both the duty and the thrill of exhibiting art and images produced for and by society is how we believe we fulfill our mission as an art gallery.

The Language of Music

Rolling Stones, Between the Buttons (outtake) ©Gered Mankowitz

Music is one of the most common of human languages. Some might say, because of its accessibility, that music is our most common language. Words like composition, structure, style, mood find their use in describing literary work and painting as much as in describing music. Completely abstract, as language and communication can often be, the music and rhythms we hear stimulate, relax, engage us literally from infancy.

Melodies and lyrics help carry the written and unwritten human narrative from place to place, generation to generation, era to era reaffirming hope and personal aspirations, giving outlet for frustrations and sadness, calling us to action or leading us to rest.

And any person or image associated with the music that moves us becomes an extension of the music itself and what it means to us. Music and music-makers become part of the fabric of our lives in part for their ability to “read a culture's mind” and broadcast what they’ve read to the rest of us.

Lou Reed, Transformer ©Mick Rock

Sometimes a simple song can be as water in our canteen as we approach the challenges of the day or it can be the method we use to let go of our burdens when we come home. Music can lift us to dance, to remember our hopes and dreams or act as the last push that causes us to fall in love. Those who effectively express places of their hearts and minds by voice and crafted instrument to reach the hearts and minds of others are honored as any hero might be, as they should. These are the poet philosophers, evangelists of ideals, counselors and consolers during love’s seasons.

Not many of us can bridge human feelings and experiences across time and space to bind cultures, people, generations. We exhibit the art and photography, both online and off, that deliver clues and act as aesthetic ambassadors of the music and musicians they serve. It is our way to pay homage to music’s visionaries who, by their unique gifts and efforts, knit us together globally across time with their universal language and the imagery their work germinates.