These signed prints by Salvador Dalí have been forgotten in a garage for half a century

Ten signed prints by a Spanish artist for 50 years Salvador Dalí was hidden in a garage in London. Now, the colorful ones lithographs are heading to auction, where they are expected to sell for £5,000 ($6,600).

Chris Kirkham, Deputy Director of Hanson’s Richmond auction house in London discovered the pieces when a client asked him to appraise antiques at his home in Berkeley Square.

“During the visit, the seller took me into his garage, and lo and behold, out came this treasure trove of surreal lithographs,” says Kirkham in a statement from the auction house. “They were tucked away and forgotten for about fifty years.”

In addition to the ten Dalí prints, the homeowner also had five lithographs with him Theo Tobiassea French painter and sculptor. All 15 pieces will be auctioned on September 30, with each Dalí print expected to fetch £300 to £500 ($400 to $660) and each Tobiasse print £100 to £300 ($130 to $400).

According to Hansons, the homeowner bought the collection of loose lithographs from a London gallery in the 1970s. He paid £500 for the entire collection, a tenth of what they are now expected to sell for.

Born in Spain in 1904, Dalí was one of the most prominent painters of the Surrealist movement, who sought to “liberate the unbridled imagination of the subconscious,” as James Voorhies wrote of the Metropolitan Art Museum‘s website in 2004. Dalí’s art depicted “erotically charged, hallucinatory visions,” often involved melting clocks, telephones and ants.

A London man finds signed prints by Salvador Dali in his garage

The artist’s work often sells for astonishing sums: his most expensive piece, Portrait of Paul Éluardwent first approximately $17.8 million in 2011. More than thirty years after his death in 1989, Dalí is famous all over the world. Earlier this year, a museum in Florida opened an exhibit that allowed visitors to chat with an AI replica of the artist.

The recently discovered prints are uniform in color. Some of them show human forms next to plants, animals and architecture similar to Roman Coliseum.

“I think the fact that these have been inactive for so long has kept the colors fresh,” says Kirkham Sky News. “Every Dalí signature gives people a wonderful opportunity to own something that the great man touched.”

Tobiasse was born in 1927 into a Jewish family in what was then Mandatory Palestine. He moved with his parents to Lithuania and Paris, where the German occupation forced him into hiding. In the years following the end of World War II, the artist explored the Jewish experience in his work: his oil and gouache paintings often depict themes of exile and isolation. He would become known for his Expressionist, figurative paintings.

The buyer of the 15 prints originally planned to frame them and hang them in his home, but he “never got around to it,” Kirkham said in the statement. “Now his lithographs will finally see the light of day.”

The discovery “felt quite surreal,” he adds. “You never know what you’re going to discover during a routine home visit.”