DRIFT AUDIO
Listen to this story
Choose a voice, then press play.
A seven colour stencil canvas built from a pill bottle’s own view lang, still circulating a decade after it left a Shoreditch gallery wall.
“Valium Lover” measures 125 by 95 by 3 centimetres, or roughly 49 by 37 inches once the canvas depth is factored in, built up from seven colours of spray paint pushed through hand cut stencils onto canvas. It is signed and circulated as a limited work rather than a one off, which tracks with how Ben Frost actually builds a painting: he cuts a stencil once, then reuses it across a small run of canvases, each one hand sprayed and individually finished rather than mechanically reproduced. The result sits somewhere between a unique painting and an edition, a hybrid that his market has learned to describe simply as a “signed, limited edition” canvas.
The piece now lives in the inventory of Addicted Art Gallery, a Singapore dealership that has represented Frost’s work on the secondary market for years. A closely relate canvas from the same body of work, “Store In A Dark Place (Mickey On Prozac),” passed through the same gallery at a framed size of 68 by 80.5 by 7 centimetres and an asking price of £4,700, giving a rough sense of where a mid sized Frost canvas from this period tends to land, though the gallery’s own price and edition number for “Valium Lover” specific were not published anywhere this piece could indie verify, and are flagged here rather than guessed.
What the title promises is squarely inside Frost’s known register from the period: a pharmaceutical brand name paired with one of his stock cast of dazed, Lichtenstein inflected pop heroines, rendered in the flat, poster bright palette he borrows from advertising itself. One profile of the artist around this period described his female figures as sitting somewhere between old Hollywood glamour and a cartoon comedown, which fits “Valium Lover” as a title built for exactly that collision: a benzodiazepine cast as a romantic interest, love and sedation collapsed into one flat, spray painted joke.
View this post on Instagram
in
“Valium Lover” debuted as part of Frost’s solo show “The New Pollution,” which ran at StolenSpace Gallery in London from July 10 to August 2, 2015. StolenSpace sits at the Brick Lane end of Shoreditch inside a converted stonemason’s workshop, a roughly 1,000 square foot space with exposed brick walls and workshop windows that the gallery has occupied since 2006, and its roster over the years has run through names like D*Face, Shepard Fairey and Seen, artists who moved from walls into gallery frames without losing the register of the street. The gallery moved quickly on to its next show once “The New Pollution” closed, opening a Ben Eine solo exhibition, “Your Not My Type,” that October, a turnover pace typical of a space that treats its walls as a rotating stage rather than a permanent collection.
The show hung “Valium Lover” alongside a run of similarly pill and packaging themed pieces, according to visitor documentation from the exhibition: “Mickey On Zoloft,” “Love: 100 Tablets,” “Quaalude Lover,” “Cocaine (Justonemorebump)” and a Burger King branded riff titled “Black Cock” on one wall, a run of candy and liquor themed canvases including “Milk Duds,” “Larger Size,” “Avoid Alcohol” and “Forbidden Fruit” on another, and a collage grouping of “Store In A Dark Place,” “Vicodin Dreams” and “Morphine Tears” nearby. Read together, the show worked less like a single joke than a full aisle of one, cartoon mascots and candy colored heroines standing in for a culture increasingly medicated, branded and sold back to itself.
Frost has been circling this same territory in interviews for years. Speaking to LODOWN Magazine around the period, he coined the term advertainment to describe how television commercials had become as rewarding to watch as the programming around them, arguing that advertising was “the engine that drives media based capitalism.” “The New Pollution” put that argument on canvas: pills standing in for products, cartoon faces standing in for spokespeople, and consumer choice recast as a symptom rather than a freedom.
View this post on Instagram
length
Frost was born in Brisbane in 1975 and is most often described in gallery biographies as based in Melbourne, Australia, though his New York representation, Harman Projects, describes him as an Australian born, New York based artist, a discrepancy this piece could not fully resolve. What is not in dispute is the method: stencils and spray paint, acrylic on canvas, and, increasing over the years, paint apply direct onto found packaging itself, from McDonald’s fry boxes to actual pharmaceutical cartons for drugs like codeine, oxycodone and Endone.
That last habit has been the throughline of his career and its biggest source of friction. Gallery biographies distributed alongside his print editions describe a 2000 exhibition called “Ben Frost is Dead,” for which the artist faked his own death and made national news in Australia in the process. A later painting, “White Children Playing,” depicted children using drugs and reported drew enough anger that a masked assailant slashed one of the canvases during Frost’s show at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. Police are also said to have tried to remove one of his collaborative pieces from a Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition in Sydney over its graphic content. Those episodes are repeated consistently across the artist’s own gallery syndicate biography, though this piece could not locate contemporaneous news coverage independently confirm the details beyond that shared text, and the gap is noted plainly rather than smoothed over. The same biography credits Frost with founding and continuing to run Stupid Krap, an Australian street art website, and with starting Paste Modernism, a yearly paste up festival described in that same gallery text as the largest event of its kind in the world.
Frost has kept working the same pharmaceutical vein well past 2015. A more recent series distributed through Harman Projects reworks Looney Tunes and Muppets characters onto real drug packaging: a Fozzie Bear rendered onto Seroquel, a Snagglepuss variant painted directly onto Valium packaging itself, a Sleepy the Dwarf figure on Diazepam, a Yogi Bear on Norspan and a Papa Smurf on a Covid era treatment box, each one built the same way “Valium Lover” was a decade earlier, a trusted cartoon face laid straight over a real prescription label. The through line across all of it is consistent: familiar, trusted cartoon faces doing the emotional labor that pharmaceutical marketing usually reserves for reassuring taglines and soft focus stock photography.
to
Frost’s mash up style eventually crossed over from gallery walls into fashion. In 2018, designer Jeremy Scott previewed a capsule collection built around Frost’s artwork at Moschino‘s Fall runway show in Milan, a collaboration that put Frost’s cartoon and packaging graphics onto handbags, t shirts, jackets and iPhone cases under a line eventually sold as “Moschino Eyes.” Frost separately partnered with Carolina Herrera on a limited edition release tied to her 212 Pop! fragrance, and has done project work with Pearl Jam, ski brand Rossignol, Australian label Mambo, Melbourne’s Livid Music Festival and J&B Whiskey, according to his gallery biography.
View this post on Instagram
His exhibition history over two decades spans solo shows in London, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, Toronto, Singapore, Berlin, Miami, Turin, Bangkok and San Francisco, with group inclusions at Berlin’s Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art and in “Pop the Streets,” a showcase of street derived pop artists at London’s Saatchi Gallery. In the United States, his primary representation today runs through Los Angeles’s Corey Helford Gallery.
The gallery’s clearest recent statement of intent arrived on September 17, 2022, when it opened “Friends in High Places,” a Frost solo show built entirely around cartoon mascots reimagined as drug dealers and users: Bart Simpson dosed on Ritalin, a Looney Tunes rabbit branded “50mg Thumper,” a glammed up Miss Piggy pushing Chanel, and a Baby Yoda passing joints with Fred Flintstone. Frost described the show as “both a satirical critique of consumer culture and a begrudging celebration of it,” a line that could just as easily describe “Valium Lover” seven years earlier. The show ran through October 22, 2022, alongside Kristen Liu-Wong’s “Hard Pressed” in the gallery’s second room, and marked Frost’s first CHG solo outing since 2019’s “Pure Sugar.”
show
Market tracker MutualArt lists Frost’s headline auction record at $6,712, alongside a twelve month average of $564, figures that sit oddly next to the platform’s own FAQ, which states that the artist’s actual record price since 2010 is $9,000, set by a painting called “Shrooms” sold on eBay in 2025, and that his paintings have averaged $1,314 at auction over the past year against $527 for prints and graphic works. That internal inconsistency in MutualArt’s own numbers is not resolved here, only noted, since neither figure could be independently reconciled against the other. What both readings agree on is the shape of the market: Frost’s paintings on canvas, the format “Valium Lover” belongs to, consistently sell for several multiples of his paper editions, and total auction turnover for the artist sits at roughly $276,600 across a sell through rate of 83.8 percent, a healthy number for a working artist still selling contemporary output through both primary galleries and the secondary market simultaneously.
extend
Retail listings on the secondary market back up that spread. A five colour screen print titled “Morphine Tears,” from the same 2015 period as “Valium Lover” and limited to an edition of 50, has traded around $1,950 before discount. A strictly limited edition of 30 giclee prints called “Endone” has listed near $1,998. A larger edition of 100 titled “Gotta Take ‘Em All,” built around a Pikachu mash up, has asked $2,500. Against those paper editions, one dealer has listed an original acrylic canvas called “Happy Helmet,” described as Frost’s largest original painting to date, at $6,000 to $8,000 before discount, the same rough bracket that a signed, limited canvas like “Valium Lover” would be expected to sit in.
Addicted Art Gallery, which currently holds “Valium Lover,” was itself founded in the same year the painting was made. The gallery began as a personal collection kept by an Australian couple who moved to Singapore for work in 2002, spent years living between London and New York, and eventually turned their own buying habit into a business in 2015, organizing their inventory into three categories: contemporary art with a South East Asian focus, urban and pop art, and vintage posters and Art Deco pieces. Frost’s stencil canvases fall squarely into that middle category, sold alongside a certificate of authenticity and an independent condition report, the same paperwork that accompanied “Store In A Dark Place” when it passed through the same dealer. The gallery operates by appointment and online rather than out of a walk in storefront, describing its own approach as connecting collectors to art in what it calls a friendly, posh less, non highbrow way, and offering Singapore based buyers the option of a home gallery viewing rather than a traditional showroom visit.
Ten years after it left StolenSpace’s walls in Shoreditch, “Valium Lover” is still doing the job Frost built it to do: turning a pharmaceutical label into a punchline sturdy enough to survive being reframed, resold and shipped from London to Singapore without losing its bite.
Related Articles
Andy Warhol Cut a Deal With Disney, and Mickey Mouse Became Art
A 1981 screenprint sealed in diamond dust, and the negotiation that let Andy Warhol borrow […]
