Hello, friends. Dmitry Afremov here. Today I want to talk about something that has become increasingly important to me: fake Afremov art, unauthorized sellers, and where you can actually buy Leonid Afremov’s work legitimately. For the last several years I have been fighting to clean up my father’s name online. By that I mean removing people and companies that have no right to sell his work. But recently we went one step further: we have also ended relationships with sellers who previously DID have permission to sell our work. Yes, even authorized sellers. We decided that there were simply too many places selling Afremov products, too many descriptions written by different people, too many different standards of production, and ultimately too many things that I personally could not control.

Let me start with prints, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with buying a print. A good print is a beautiful, accurate reproduction of an image you love. Maybe you don’t want to spend the money on an original oil painting, or maybe the original was sold many years ago and simply doesn’t exist on the market anymore. Fine. Buy a print and enjoy it. The important question is where you buy it. For many years we worked with a number of print-on-demand companies, probably too many of them. This was actually quite normal years ago. Artists uploaded their images to different print-on-demand websites, those companies produced and shipped the prints, and the artist received royalties. We did the same thing and over the years Afremov images ended up on dozens of different platforms. But as of August 1, we decided to put an end to that system.

My father Leonid started working with Fine Art America a very long time ago. This relationship goes back many years, practically decades. They have consistently done a good job, they know how to produce the work properly, they ship reliably, and most importantly, we trust them. So we made the decision to give Fine Art America exclusive authorization for our prints. If you want an official Leonid Afremov print, there are now only two places to go: Fine Art America or prints.afremov.com. They are effectively the same authorized source. Nobody else is currently authorized by us to produce or sell new Afremov prints. Not another marketplace, not another print-on-demand company, not some random Facebook page, not somebody who created a website yesterday. We don't even produce prints ourselves on Afremov.com anymore. We decided that one professional company should handle prints and that is the end of the story.

We are still in the process of closing some of our old accounts because, amusingly enough, some websites make it incredibly easy to open an account and surprisingly difficult to close one. But we are working through them. At the same time, we are constantly reporting fake accounts and unauthorized sellers. I literally have people whose job includes finding these sellers and reporting them. There are thousands of fake listings, accounts and websites using my father's name and images to sell prints, posters, canvas reproductions and all kinds of other products. If you see somebody selling newly produced Afremov prints anywhere other than Fine Art America or prints.afremov.com, please send it to us. We want to know about it and we will deal with it.

Oil paintings are even simpler. If you want an Afremov oil painting — something painted by hand on canvas — the authorized source is afremov.com. That's it. We have ended our relationships with outside galleries and marketplaces for these sales. We sell oil paintings directly. Prints are handled through Fine Art America. Oil paintings are handled through us. People sometimes write to me and say, “But I found it on a huge marketplace and I trust that marketplace more.” That's perfectly understandable, but we don't sell there. I'm not going to open an account on some giant marketplace just because two people would rather buy there. If somebody is selling newly produced Afremov oil paintings there while presenting themselves as an authorized Afremov seller, they are not authorized by us.

And please understand why I care about this so much. This isn't simply about where the money goes. It is about my father's name. When you buy from some unknown seller because they offer an “Afremov print” for a few dollars, you have absolutely no idea what you are going to receive. Maybe it will be printed on something that looks like a fifty-year-old newspaper. Maybe the colors will be completely wrong. Maybe an “oil painting” will arrive that looks like it was painted by a three-year-old. Maybe nothing will arrive at all. Then the customer is angry, the money is gone, and somehow the Afremov name gets blamed for a product that we never made, never sold and never even saw. I see reviews and complaints online and sometimes discover that the person never purchased anything from us in the first place. They bought something carrying our name from somebody else and then associate that experience with us.

So I am asking for one very simple thing. If you love Leonid Afremov's work and want to support his legacy, please don't support people who are exploiting his name and images. You don't need to hunt around the internet wondering which seller is legitimate anymore. We deliberately made it simple. If you want an oil painting, go to afremov.com. If you want a print, go to prints.afremov.com or Fine Art America. Those are the sources we stand behind. We have been operating Afremov.com under the same domain for 24 years, and Fine Art America is a large, established company that we have trusted with my father's work for many years.

You may find somebody offering something cheaper somewhere else. You may even find somebody offering an “Afremov” print for one dollar. But cheap garbage with my father's name printed underneath it is not a bargain. Nobody wins from that. You receive something disappointing, you waste your money, scammers make money from a name they did not build, and my father's reputation gets damaged in the process. So please don't support them. If you want Afremov, buy Afremov from the people who are actually authorized to provide it. Oil paintings: afremov.com. Prints: prints.afremov.com / Fine Art America. That's it.