Fake Heiress Anna Delvey Sold $340,000 in Artworks Often Featuring Herself

Fake heiress Anna Delvey has made real money selling her paintings and drawings, mostly featuring herself, totaling $340,000, according to a report published by The New York Post.

The 31-year-old Delvey, whose real name is Anna Sorokin, was convicted of larceny, grand theft and financial crimes in 2019 for thefts so notorious they were made into the Netflix miniseries Inventing Anna by Shonda Rhimes.

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After completing a two-year-sentence at Rikers Island, Delvey was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for 17 months for overstaying her visa. In May, she launched a solo art show titled “Allegedly,” making a surprise virtual appearance from detention. Delvey was released on house arrest in October.

The drawings are simple pencil-on-paper illustrations with a comical bent mostly referencing Delvey herself wearing designer labels. Some of the drawings are fake newspaper covers spoofing the front page of the New York Times titled The Delvey Crimes or The Delvey Journal, featuring cartoons and captions about her own misdeeds.

Delvey is represented by art dealer Chris Martine , who co-founded the Founders Art Club. “She has an intriguing style, but the more important thing is really the intangibles that she brings to the table, which is that people are just fascinated by her,” he told Artnews in March.

Originals of Sorokin’s artworks have sold for $25,000 and prints were listed at $250 each, with celebrities like “Saturday Night Live” star Chloe Fineman among the buyers. Martine told The New York Post that Fineman purchased an autographed, limited edition print of “Run It Again” portraying Sorokin pleading for a sales clear to try her credit card again. Martine, cofounder of the New York-based Founders Arts Club, also told The Post that prints have been sold to “40 or 50 countries”.

Last month, Sorokin released four original artworks and four first-edition prints with the Brooklyn art gallery The Locker Room.

San Francisco-based tech entrepreneur Casey Grooms bought one of the items in the “The House (Arrest) Collection.” He paid $15,000 for the painting “Prowling in Prada,” a 20-by-16-inch acrylic on canvas featuring Sorokin wearing a black trenchcoat, pants, high-heels, scarf and sunglasses. Grooms said he was attracted to the idea of Sorokin and her life story, prompting him to buy this as his first art piece.

According to Variety, the art sales helped Sorokin post bail and pay three months’ of rent for her $4,250 one-bedroom East Village apartment.

In addition to these paintings and drawings, Delvey minted a series of NFTs titled “Reinventing Anna,” in June when she was still behind bars. The NFTs featured images of prints that Delvey created offering stylized versions of episodes from her own life and were priced at 0.08 ETH, or around $90 at the time.

Financial issues have also become an issue in Delvey’s art career. Artist and writer Julia Morrison said she put down $8,000 to help stage the Free Anna group show in March, but told The New York Post in June that she still hadn’t been paid back.

Source: artnews.com

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