The contemporary art world is packed with young talent, but it's hard to remember an artist who has received as much acclaim so early in his career as Andrés Valencia.
In the last year, he's gone from relative obscurity to a bonafide artistic phenomenon: His surrealist-inspired paintings have been snapped up by wealthy collectors like Tommy Mottola and Jessica Goldman Srebnick during Art Basel Miami Beach, and in June he had a solo exhibition at Chase Contemporary Gallery in SoHo, where all 35 works sold for between $50,000 and $125,000, according to the gallery.
One of his paintings sold for $159,000 (including fees) at a Phillips de Pury auction in Hong Kong, and another sold for $230,000 at a charity gala on the Italian island of Capri.
“I love making people happy with my work and having them hang it in their homes,” he said at Chase Gallery on a recent Monday. He was standing in front of one of his works, “The Professor,” a large, Cubist-style painting of a man, painted in acrylic and oil, standing four and a half feet tall — the same height as the artist himself. “I did this when I was younger, when I was eight years old,” he added bashfully.
It is noteworthy that Andres Valencia, who has been called an “art genius” and a “little Picasso,” is only 10 years old.
With the gallery closed, Andrés was accompanied by his mother, Elsa Valencia, 48, who works as a jewelry designer when she's not taking her son to art shows, and gallery owner Barney Chase, who guided him around his exhibition dressed like a preppy college kid in a white Ralph Lauren polo shirt, blue jeans and crisp Nike Jordans.
“The clowns are such classics,” he said, introducing a piece called “Max the Clown.” Another, “The Godfather,” was commissioned by a Florida family and depicts a mob boss.
Like a precocious student unaware of his own maturity, he listed off sources of inspiration including Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Pokémon, Picasso's “Guernica” and click-and-play military action figures.
“I've been in the art business for 20 years,” Chase said, standing proudly at his side, “I've worked with people like Peter Beard and Kenny Scharf. Andres has the potential to be just as big, if not bigger.”
Andres may be showered with accolades, but he's also a fifth-grader with math homework. “He's an artist, but he's a kid first,” his mother says. “He's a kid, not a celebrity.”
That's not to say that she and her husband, Lupe Valencia, 50, a lawyer and the player-manager of Cuban professional boxer Frank Sanchez, didn't have a huge influence in their son's overnight rise to fame.
They temporarily hired veteran New York publicist Nadine Johnson, and are now working with theater and arts publicist Sam Morris. Praise for the baby-faced artist has appeared in the Miami Herald, the New York Post, Forbes and the London Times. He was featured on ABC's “World News Tonight.”
His mother said her son's big income was an opportunity to teach him “how to give back to society.” The Valencias said more than $300,000 from Andres' sales has been donated to the AIDS charity amfAR and the children's charity Box of Hope.
His artistic career began at the age of four, when his parents noticed him spending hours in the dining room of their San Diego home sketching pictures of graffiti artist Letna, one of his father's former clients.
“I would always bring a piece of paper and sit there and try to copy it, and it took me years to get it right,” Andres said, fidgeting in his seat.
His artistic confidence soared, and he sold watercolors for $20 each to family friends, including Mr. Chase, who offered to pay him $100 each time he visited the Valencias in San Diego. Andres proved just as effective a salesman, and upped the price to $5,000. “So I said, 'All right, I'll pay you $5,000 for this painting,'” Mr. Chase said with a laugh. “I walked him out to the car to write him the check, and Elsa came running after me yelling, 'What are you doing?'”
Chase says he convinced the Valencias to buy enough paintings for their son to “expose his talent to the world.” He then contacted Nick Kornilov, director of Art Miami, a parallel fair to Art Basel, to give the young artist his debut.
Kornilov said he was initially “very skeptical when Bernie asked me to work with this 10-year-old,” but he figured there would be a pent-up demand for “something fun” after the pandemic. “The story of a talented 10-year-old painter was satisfying,” he added.
Still, Kornilov was wary of “risking his reputation” for a middle-schooler, so he didn't mention Andres' age in the fair's promotional materials, but during VIP walk-throughs he coyly asked collectors: “How would you feel if these works were made by a 10-year-old boy, and some of them were made when he was only 8?”
News of the child artist quickly spread, and celebrities like Sofia Vergara and Channing Tatum bought his works. Reporters tried to prove that the pieces could have been painted by someone so young. Kornilov invited Valencia to paint live with popular street artist Bradley Theodore, who was decades older than him. The spectacle attracted even more media attention.
His following continues to grow: Earlier this month, the BTS singer known as V shared one of Andrés's works, a cubist-style portrait of a man, with his 50 million Instagram followers.
Underage artists are rare, but not uncommon in the art world: A few years ago, collectors paid $250 to $1,500 for expressionist doodles by 2-year-old art star Laura June. Some young art stars, like Alexandra Nechita, who was dubbed “Mozart with a paintbrush” on a talk show at age 12 and made millions in sales, are still creating art today.
Child stars aren't always so kind to others. Marla Olmstead sold abstract paintings for thousands of dollars when she was just 4 years old, but years later, a “60 Minutes” segment and an investigative documentary questioned whether her father had coached her in art.
Other contemporary-art gallery owners have warned that the speculative frenzy around Andres may not last. “Too many people think of emerging artists as an asset class protected from inflation,” said Alexander Shuran, owner of Andres' gallery. Romex is a downtown Manhattan gallery that focuses on emerging artists, “but a young artist's life changes dramatically over time, so it's pretty foolish to assume that an investment in a 24-year-old painter is going to last, let alone an artist much younger – in this case, an actual child.”
Back at the gallery, Andrés picked up the notepad in front of him and started drawing a portrait. “When people see a kid sketching on paper with marker, they think that the painting shouldn't be in a gallery,” he said, putting his pen down. “Older people sometimes don't understand.”
