Just when you thought 2022 couldn’t get any weirder: Anna Sorokin (AKA the infamous scammer Anna Delvey) has just announced her first solo art exhibition.
Titled “Allegedly”, the exhibition will be filled with sketches that Sorokin has been working on while in prison and mark the start, she says, of her reclaiming her story.
Sorokin, who was sentenced to four to twelve years in prison in 2019, was arrested in 2017 and charged with theft, fraud and grand larceny after tricking most of New York into believing she was a German socialite and heiress called Anna Delvey.
She subsequently sold the rights to her story to Netflix for a figure believed to be in the region of $320,000 (approximately £258,000) to help pay off some of her debts. The streaming giant then created the series Inventing Anna, starring Julia Garner.
Despite this, Sorokin has been sharing her artworks with her million Instagram followers over the past months.
The black and white pencil sketches show the Russian-born scammer making business deals from a prison phone, relaxing on an ice floe and sitting on a sunbed beneath an umbrella – with the chain-link fence of a prison visible in the background.
In most of them, she’s wearing clearly labelled designer clothes, and it seems that people want to buy them.
The solo exhibition, which will launch on Thursday May 19 at the Public Hotel in New York, will consist of twenty of Sorokin’s artworks. They were drawn during her time in an ICE detention centre, where she has been since early 2021. She is currently still there, waiting to hear the results of an appeal against an upcoming deportation back to her home country of Germany.
Sorokin told Page Six that she started drawing to “capture some of the moments of the past years, both never-seen-before and iconic, using the limited tools I have at my disposal”.
“Some of the pieces are straightforward, others are more abstract and will be unique in meaning and appearance to the observer.”
She added: “You’ve heard so many voices already. But this is the beginning of me telling my story, my narrative, from my perspective.”
According to a representative of Founders Art Club, who is handling Sorokin’s sales, the show’s total value comes to an impressive $500,000 (£403,000).
Despite this, the artworks aren’t exactly for sale: instead, she is selling a 48 per cent stake in the ownership of the collection.
Any takers?
