Urban Art for Sale Online: How to Buy Without the Gamble

Finding urban art for sale online takes about four seconds. Actually pressing buy is another matter. Your card's in your hand, there's a photo on the screen, and a little voice is asking whether it's genuine, whether it'll survive the post, and whether you're about to overpay someone you've never met.

We know that feeling well. We've been answering those exact questions for collectors since 2015.

BSMT is an independent gallery on Kingsland Road in Dalston, East London. Over more than a hundred exhibitions we've sold over a million pounds of art online, everything from £50 editions to £20k originals, to collectors in the UK, the US and right across Europe and Asia. Plenty of them have never been to the gallery and still snap work up the day it's released. This is how we earned that trust, and how you can buy street art online with your eyes open.

Buy with your gut, not a spreadsheet

Our one real piece of advice is to buy what you resonate with.

When a piece genuinely gets under your skin, that feeling sticks around. You'll walk past it every morning for years and it'll still catch you. Art bought purely as an investment tends to end up as a financial product hanging in the hallway, and where's the joy in that?

Every so often the spark and the investment turn up in the same piece, and honestly that's the best feeling in collecting. We've watched it happen for plenty of our collectors. But the spark has to come first. ALO is a perfect example. Plenty of people walk past his characters on the walls of East London for years before discovering they can actually take one home. As his reputation keeps growing, collectors who bought his originals early are looking very smart indeed.

You also don't need deep pockets to start. Originals are generally the stronger investment, but if one isn't in budget, a signed print is a brilliant way in. And because we're a framing studio as well as a gallery, we can finish it properly for you, with bespoke shadow float mounting and acid-free materials that keep it looking right for decades.

If you'd rather spread the cost, we're part of Own Art, which lets you pay over ten months interest free. It exists to make collecting something normal people can actually do, and we're big fans.

Is it real?

Fair question, and probably the one we hear most. The online art market has its share of dodgy sellers, so you're right to ask.

Everything we sell, whether it's an edition or a five-figure original, comes with a Certificate of Authenticity. Every single piece, so you know exactly what you've bought and can prove it down the line.

Will it arrive in one piece?

This is the bit most online sellers skate over, and it's the bit we care about most, because the trip between our walls and yours is where things can go wrong.

Greg packs every piece himself. He's spent the last ten years crating and shipping artwork, so nothing leaves the gallery in a generic box packed by someone who's never seen it before. Each work gets packaging built around it, triwall for some and foam-lined wooden crates for others, depending on whether it's a canvas or framed behind glass.

Most of it travels tracked with DHL Express. On international orders Greg keeps an eye on the tracking himself, and if a piece gets stuck in customs somewhere between London and New York, he's the one on the phone sorting the paperwork long before you'd ever need to worry. Decades running front of house in some of the West End's best restaurants left him with a service instinct that's never really switched off.

Are we fairly priced?

We are, and we always have been. Honestly, we'd much rather a piece went home to someone who loves it than sat in the store room after a show closes. Inflated gallery markups have never been how we work.

Why a gallery beats a marketplace

You can buy art on Artsy, Saatchi Art, eBay and plenty of other platforms. So why come to us?

Mainly because an algorithm can't tell you anything about the artist. When you buy from BSMT you get the stories too: the hours we spent on scaffolding while a mural went up, the paint jam where we first met the artist now hanging on your wall, everything that went on behind the scenes of the show. That's what turns a purchase into something more, and it's exactly what a marketplace strips out.

We also keep in touch. Our collectors hear from us on WhatsApp, get our Collectors Catalogues before exhibitions open, and pretty quickly become part of the BSMT family.

Then there's the way we choose the work. Our rule has always been that if we wouldn't hang it in our own home, it doesn't go on the gallery walls. It's kept us well away from the high-street habit of showing the same safe names as everyone else. Instead you get an eclectic mix of urban art, pop surrealism and contemporary work, often from artists you'd be unlikely to stumble on by yourself. For a lot of our collectors, that discovery is half the fun.

How it all started

A little history, because it explains a lot about how we work.

In 2012, after decades in the West End, Greg ended up working front of house at a restaurant in Hackney just as Instagram was taking off. He started posting the street art he spotted around Shoreditch and Camden, and people began tagging the artists in the comments. That was the hook. He'd recognise a wall from an artist's work-in-progress post, turn up, and end up holding ladders and passing paint. He spent a slightly unhealthy amount of time online identifying artists in other people's photos, which grew a following for him and for them, and bit by bit he became part of the scene.

Then he met Lara, who is a true force to behold! She'd found a basement live-work space in Dalston and asked him to help do it up. He'd taken the summer off so it was an easy yes, and before long she asked him to curate the launch show too. He went to a live drawing battle the next night and had thirty artists on board by the end of the week. That was the start of BSMT.

The first show was called Underhand. Greg moved into the basement with Lara and spent a solid month curating it and building it online. The community treated the place like a clubhouse from day one, and for the first six months nobody realised the two of them were living there, with their bedroom doubling as the art store. Once it was clear this was turning into something much bigger, they moved out and gave the whole space over to the gallery.

The shows were belters right from the start. Robert Sheehan, Chris Pine, Rita Ora and Nathalie Emmanuel all made their way down the basement stairs, and Gilbert and George dropped in too, largely because they ate at Mangal across the road every single night.

We've produced the debut solo shows for Helch, Fanakapan, Himbad, Perspicere, Gokcen, Epod, Perishable Rush, Dave Towers, Itaewon, Rocket01 and Joe Sangre in their earlier days, alongside many other solo shows of well established artists. Helch had never sold work commercially through a gallery before his debut with us, No Half Measures. In 2016 Rocco and his Brothers, the anonymous Berlin crew whose illegal installations had been baffling press and police across the city, trusted us to reveal themselves to the world in Right Side of the Tracks. Last year we celebrated our 10th anniversary with a group show called Front Room celebrating the artists we have worked with over the decade.

And most recently we curated two shows at the Saatchi Gallery. 'States of Transition', a solo show for Perspicere and his remarkable works built from intricately strung thread. And a group show, 'Materiality', which considered what happens when the physical substance of an artwork becomes as significant as the image, object or idea it carries.​

Along the way the shows have been picked up by Juxtapoz, Time Out, Beautiful Bizarre, 10 Magazine, Hero, FAD Magazine and the Hackney Citizen. Inspiring City has been writing about us since our very first months in 2015, which says a lot about the company we keep. Have a read through our press archive.

Find your piece

So that's us. Genuine certificates, obsessive packing, fair prices, a real person on the end of the phone, and a roster you'd struggle to find anywhere else.

If you're looking for urban art for sale online and want to buy from people who choose every piece with their heart, have a browse through the shop and go with whatever gives you the spark.

And if nothing jumps out today, sign up to the mailing list. New work and new shows land all the time, and the best pieces don't tend to hang around.

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