Cristina BanBan

Cristina BanBan was born in 1987 in El Prat de Llobregat, on the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain. By her own account she began attending an after-school art program at around age five and continued there for roughly twelve years, eventually teaching younger children in the same program as a teenager. She went on to earn a BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, completing her degree in 2010.

Amid Spain's financial crisis, BanBan relocated to London around 2012, where she built an early exhibition record through smaller galleries, including the Dot Project (2018) and, further afield, 68 Projects in Berlin (2019) and WOAW Gallery in Hong Kong (2020). Her work was included in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2017, the year she also won the Arts Club Prize from the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2019 she held a residency at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy.

BanBan moved to New York around 2019 and now lives and works in Brooklyn. Her New York gallery relationships grew from a 2021 collaboration between 1969 Gallery and albertz benda on the exhibition Del Llanto to representation by Perrotin, and, from 2022, by Skarstedt. She has since shown solo with both galleries in New York, London, and Paris, and in 2025 opened Lorquianas, her first institutional solo exhibition, at the Museum of Fine Arts at the Palace of Charles V in Granada, Spain, followed by a related Perrotin Paris presentation.

Critical writing on BanBan has focused consistently on her treatment of the female body: large, deliberately exaggerated, Rubenesque figures rendered with expressive, often unfinished-looking brushwork, and framed by the artist as autobiographical rather than idealized. She has received sustained feature coverage in art-world press, including a Juxtapoz cover story on her "big energy" in 2023 and an earlier profile, "The Nuance of Memory," both of which treat her as a leading figure in the broader return of figuration to contemporary painting discourse. Gallery and platform texts describe her voluptuous, layered compositions of overlapping, stretching bodies as a deliberate departure from idealized figuration, and as a kind of visual journal of her own experience.

Public reporting on BanBan's auction results is still thin and, at times, inconsistent across currencies and aggregators. Press coverage of the London sales described La Fatiga que me das (You Exhaust Me) as a new record when it sold for GBP 163,800 at Christie's, London, in 2024, exceeding an earlier GBP 144,900 result for As I Set Myself Free at Phillips London on 29 June 2022, which had itself been reported as a record at the time. Separately, the tracker ArtCollection.io lists a 2025 sale of Mariana totaling USD 156,250 on 12 November 2025, though the auction house for that sale is not confirmed in available sources, and no report has shown this figure to exceed the GBP 163,800 result once currency is accounted for. Collectors should treat any single "record" claim for this artist with some caution until currency, house, and exact dating are confirmed against primary sale records.

What is clearer is the trajectory: BanBan's gallery representation moved from smaller, artist-run and mid-size spaces to Perrotin and, from 2022, Skarstedt, a shift that typically precedes and supports higher secondary-market activity. Her auction presence remains modest in volume relative to that gallery profile, which is common for an artist whose market is still forming.

BanBan has no catalogue raisonne and no documented certificate of authenticity program; for a living artist with current gallery representation, provenance questions are best directed to Perrotin or Skarstedt and to the artist's studio. Her auction history is short, geographically split between London and New York sales, and reported inconsistently across currencies, so collectors should look at primary sale documentation rather than any single aggregator's "record" figure. Her strongest signal to date is institutional: representation by two blue-chip galleries within a few years, museum and foundation holdings on three continents, and a first institutional solo exhibition in 2025, all arriving well ahead of a deep or fully mature auction record.