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Buy & Sell Werner Bronkhorst Art
About Werner Bronkhorst
A gap year that lasted
Bronkhorst left Pretoria for Sydney at eighteen, meaning to stay for a gap year. Instead he stayed, working as a builder and making bespoke furniture, and the leftovers of that trade, offcuts and unused plaster, were the first materials he experimented with on a painted surface. He moved to painting full time in 2022, after the birth of his daughter. In December that year a video of one of his paintings being made reached far beyond his usual audience, and filming the studio process has been central to how people find the work ever since.
Paint first, figures last
He describes the paintings as abstract, both in how they look and in how they are physically made. Most of each canvas is given over to paint laid down in bulk with very little pigment mixed in, swept across with oversized brushes in long curves or packed in short, dense strokes. Only once that has cured does he add the figures, painted in fine detail at a tiny scale, and their size is what turns a white ridge into a ski run or a blue sweep into open water. "We're all just tiny people in a big, abstract world," he wrote when his 2025 Seoul retrospective opened.
Of the painters he cites, Bram Bogart is the one he ties to how he began. The Dutch-born Belgian abstractionist applied paint so heavily that it became an object in its own right, and Bronkhorst has said that Bogart's excess of self-made paint is what started him on this path. In 2026 he made a cloud painting in short, stacked strokes as an open homage.
Collections built around a setting
He organises his output into named collections, each built around one element or pursuit and usually launched with an exhibition. WET took water as its subject and opened at Bondi Beach in 2025. Big Balls turned to football around the 2026 World Cup. HIGH, his tenth collection, looked up at aircraft, balloons and paragliders over broad fields of sky blue and white, and was shown in Berlin in October 2026.
He has painted Porsches for more than a decade and says every collection includes one somewhere, from a 356 towing a caravan to a grid of nine 911s.
Sport and partners outside the art world
Sport supplies many of the subjects, and it has brought partners from well beyond the gallery system: Porsche, World Aquatics, the golf brand Malbon and the Formula 1 driver Lando Norris among them. Some releases began as responses to a single event, a Wimbledon fortnight and a Formula 1 race weekend among them, and were made and sold while it was happening.
Werner Bronkhorst - Blue Water High
Collector & Guidance
Buying a Werner Bronkhorst
Most Bronkhorst works on the market are prints, and his editions come in more than one kind, each documented differently. Work out which of the main types below you are looking at before comparing prices.
Original paintings
Recent originals are acrylic and acrylic gel on canvas (some catalogued as acrylic polymer), from 10 x 10 cm studies to diptychs more than two metres wide. His earliest works, from 2022 and 2023, are mostly small panels of plaster or acrylic gel and acrylic on board or plywood, and a few miniatures are acrylic on paper. The raised paint is the work: ask for photographs lit from one side, so the relief throws shadows, and look along the crests for flattening, cracking or trapped dust. Signatures vary: his monogram may appear on the front, and the signature, title and date on the reverse. Ask for the certificate; at least some recent originals have been issued with a bespoke metal one. Many paintings in each collection are kept by the artist or exhibited without ever being offered, so confirm that a work presented as an original was actually released. A painting bought at a charity auction should come with that sale's confirmation as well as the certificate.
Numbered editions
Most of his numbered editions are giclée prints on heavyweight canvas, stretched and float-framed: Meranti on recent releases, usually stained white, and stained Tasmanian oak on earlier ones. Some are on textured cotton rag paper, among them the first releases from The Strokes in 2023 and the Windows prints from HIGH. For HIGH he set edition sizes against format, so the larger prints came in smaller numbers: 99 at 30 x 40 cm, 42 at A3 and 75 x 50 cm, and 21 at 100 x 100 cm and above. Check the number against the edition stated for that title and size, find the signature and number (on canvas editions, usually on the reverse), and ask for the certificate. Metal certificates go back to his early releases: a steel one in 2023, and signed and numbered metallic ones for the Seesaw Collect editions in Seoul and the golf prints sold in New York in 2025.
Time-limited releases
Some prints were sold for a fixed period rather than in a fixed number, including the Singles prints released for Wimbledon in 2025 and the Art in Motion prints from the 2025 Las Vegas Grand Prix. These are giclée prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, with a printed signature on the accompanying certificate rather than on the sheet, and the Singles certificates describe the edition as open. The certificate is what ties the sheet to the artist, so treat an example without one with caution.
Hand-finished car prints
His 2024 charcoal car editions were limited to 11 per image, with the painted lettering added by hand to every print. Each was issued with a certificate made to look like a bank card, packed in a miniature steel briefcase, and an NFC tag on the back linked to an NFT on his website. Ask for all three.
Selling a Werner Bronkhorst
For an original painting, give the title, collection and year, the dimensions, and photographs of the front, the reverse and the surface under raking light. Include the certificate, and for a work bought at a charity auction, the confirmation from that sale. Note any knocks to the paint crests, however small: on a surface this thick they show.
For a numbered edition, give the title, size, edition number and edition total, photograph the signature and number wherever they appear (on canvas editions, usually the reverse), and include the certificate. Keep the original frame if you can. Editions leave the studio stretched and framed to his specification, and a buyer comparing examples of the same release will notice a change.
For a time-limited print, the certificate matters more than the sheet, since that is where the signature is. Photograph both sides of it and give the sheet size, because several of the tennis images were issued in more than one format. For a hand-finished car print, show the painted lettering close up, the bank-card certificate and its briefcase, and check that the NFC tag on the back still responds.
Recognition
- Solo exhibition HIGH at the Atrium Tower, Berlin, 2026, his first solo exhibition in continental Europe.
- Six-month retrospective The Whole World's a Canvas at Ground Seesaw Seochon, Seoul, 2025.
- Exhibition Golf Is Art with Malbon Golf, Soho, New York, 2025.
- Designed Lando Norris's helmet for his 150th Formula 1 start, at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, 2025.
- Painted Fish In Water on site at the World Aquatics Championships, Singapore, 2025, for the World Aquatics Foundation.
- Commissioned by Porsche Cars Australia for the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix, Melbourne, 2024.
Market & Collectability
Among the highest recorded auction results for Bronkhorst is Tiebreak! (2025), a 97 x 71 cm painting in acrylic and acrylic gel on canvas from his Wimbledon works, which sold in a FairArt timed online auction on 14 December 2025 for a winning bid of $460,000. Two paintings sold for charity in 2025 came close, and those prices reflect the cause as well as the work: Birdie Chance, offered with Malbon to benefit youth golf programmes, made $385,000 in October, and Fish In Water raised $372,600 for the World Aquatics Foundation in August.
At Phillips in New York on 16 July 2026, From Every Corner (2026), a 200 x 200 cm football painting in acrylic and acrylic gel, sold for $283,800 including premium against an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000.
Numbered canvas editions from his fixed-size releases have barely been tested at auction.
With so few results on record, a single sale can reset the reference point for a whole release. Judge an original against other originals, and an edition only against the same title, size and paper.
NOTABLE AUCTION RESULTS
Tiebreak!, 2025 | FairArt
FAQS
Do Werner Bronkhorst canvas prints have the raised texture of the originals?
Not in the image itself. On an original the paint stands proud of the canvas in ridges you can see from the side; a canvas print is flat, however convincing it looks head-on or in a photograph. The exception is lettering: on the 2023 Drive Me Crazy canvas prints and the 2024 car editions he went over the words in paint by hand. The prints are stretched and framed much like the originals, so the frame is no guide, and the artist has posted photographs of his own canvas editions captioned "THESE ARE NOT ORIGINALS!" to make the point. A numbered edition also carries its number, which an original does not.
How do you buy a Werner Bronkhorst print when it first comes out?
Most new originals and editions go on sale through his own website at a set time, usually after the exhibition that launches the collection has closed, with details sent to his mailing list. Popular editions can go quickly: all 42 copies of Evolution of Man sold out in six minutes in 2023. Some exhibition editions were sold at the show first: Sink and Swing, made for Golf Is Art in New York in 2025, were issued in editions of 72 each and sold in store, with a handful kept back for a later online release.
Are sold-out Werner Bronkhorst editions ever reprinted?
Not according to the artist, at least for the releases he has addressed. He announced one edition of 42 in 2023 as "never printed again", and when announcing another edition of 42 in 2024 he wrote that once those prints sold out they would never be made available again or reprinted.
Who produces Werner Bronkhorst's prints?
For the WET release in 2025 he set out the process himself: each painting was scanned by Standish & Co with high-end cameras that pass over the surface for hours, printed on canvas by the Left Bank Art Group in Brisbane, then stretched and framed in white-stained Meranti, with every print approved by him individually.
How many hours go into a Werner Bronkhorst painting?
He logs his studio time. Come Down, a 132 x 102 cm paraglider painting from HIGH, took exactly 669 minutes of work by his logbook. Drying time stretches that across days or weeks: a small 31 x 41 cm canvas needed just over five hours of painting spread over two weeks, because each layer has to cure before the next detail goes on.