Art Series Hotels in Australia is at it again. Last year they had a campaign challenging people to “Stay a Night, Steal the Art.” If you located the hidden Banksy piece, it was yours. Simple.
Their newest campaign engages one of the world’s best living art forgers, Tony Tetro. Which Warhol’s Warhol’s runs until August 3 and asks guests to select the real Warhol from a line up of ten to go into the chance to win. Very clever!
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From Art Series Hotels:
Tony is known for his perfectionism in copying artwork from a diverse range of artists including Dali, Chagall and Rembrandt. He has never had any formal training or a desire to develop his own style. His forgeries are a scientific masterpiece with the materials selected to age at the same speed/level as the originals. He often traveled to Europe to source canvases from the same locations as the originals. His paintings and lithographs were sold by art dealers and auction houses as legitimate works and hung in museums and galleries around the world. He was caught in the late 1980′s after Hiro Yamagata found a forgery of his own work for sale in a gallery.
He was arrested and tried in a high profile court case in LA in 1989 and was sent to jail until 1994. As part of his release he was to do 200 hours community service and as part of this was assigned to do a mural on a public building.
His passion for replicas even extended to his love of fast cars: he once made a replica 1958 Ferrari 250 Testarossa TR58 race car – of which only two were ever made. Tony hand crafted a car so perfect in the minutest detail that it could easily have passed for the genuine Ferrari lost in an accident. As of 1992, the (now missing) car was reported to be somewhere in South America. Its exact whereabouts are unknown today. In the 90′s, a real 250 Testa Rossa sold for more than $11 million.
Today he boasts celebrity clientele for replica art work, including some that is personalised (he can paint your loved one’s face into a replica of the Mona Lisa for example).
Tony has been commissioned to do nine replicas of an Andy Warhol piece and these will be on display at the Art Series Hotels along with the original. Guests will be invited to guess which one is the real deal for a chance to either win the real mccoy or a replica. One fake will be revealed each week. We will also have a number of people from the Art community trying their hand at guessing ‘Which Warhol’.
