Richard Prince

Richard Prince 1949 Panama Canal Zone - lives and works in New York The American artist Richard Prince, who repeatedly causes a stir with his radical understanding of Appropriation Art, was born on August 6, 1949 in what was then the U.S. Panama Canal Zone. From 1973 Richard Prince lives in New York, where he works for the magazine publisher Time Inc. and for Time-Life. Richard Prince began his artistic work by photographing advertisements from magazines. In this process of refotographing, as Richard Prince himself calls it, he appropriates ubiquitous and both typical and familiar images from the American mass media in order to stage them in a newly focused way. Appropriation Art and Refotography Beginning in 1980, Richard Prince created "Cowboys," his most famous series of works, for which he used photographs of Marlboro cigarette advertisements. He photographs from magazines the ad illustrations of the original, free Wild West life with the tough, smoking cowboys, selects only sections without writing and with a new focus on the cowboy, enlarges them to almost life size and shows them as his own works of art. In doing so, Richard Prince pays no heed to the ire of Marlboro photographers like Sam Abell or Norm Clasen, who insist on their copyright. By doing so, however, Richard Prince, from his point of view, merely appropriates the foreign images in the same way that the cigarette company Marlboro had previously done with the American landscape and the cowboy myth for its campaign with the slogan "Come to Marlboro Country." Richard Prince frees the cowboy from the commercial purpose of advertising, exposes the masculinity and beauty of the American landscape, and lets it stand on its own again. A work of art emerges from the change of context Another work complex is formed by the "Jokes" paintings (from 1986), for which Richard Prince prints short joke texts on large-format, monochrome canvases. For his "Nurse Paintings", created from 2003 onwards, Richard Prince takes the images of sexy blondes from biker magazines. Through the ruthless appropriation, fragmentation, altered context of an image or the monumentalized depiction of a small joke of seemingly harmless mainstream humor, Richard Prince forms impressive works of art that also address racism, sexism, psychosis and oddities, gives the subjects back a bit of their own life and dignity, but also relentlessly holds up a mirror to society. In 2014, the Gagosian Gallery in New York shows the series of "New Portraits": screenshots of selfies posted by Instagram users on their account themselves, which Richard Prince transfers unchanged, printed on canvas into the art world. The great success of this series prompts the artist to reissue the exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills in 2020. Richard Prince's late work becomes increasingly painterly, in the sense of painting with his own hands. Thus, starting in 2012, new "Cowboy" paintings are created, showing the well-known cowboy figure isolated as an inkjet print on canvas, then further painted and overpainted by Richard Prince with acrylic paint and thus embedded in a landscape with only a superficially amateurish painting gesture. In 2017, the series "Super Group" is created, for which Richard Prince collages the inner sleeves of vinyl records on canvas and further processed, painted, described. In 2018 Richard Prince shows the series "High Times", childlike painted figures, with which he reverts to the formal language of his own figure paintings from the early 1970s and the scribbles of his children. Cheeky redefinition of authorship and copyright as a recipe for success in his art The ruthless process of appropriation, but also the aesthetic power of the resulting art and its scandalous presentation, as well as the wide range of his work, make Richard Prince an extremely successful artist who is exhibited and collected internationally. The most prestigious museums worldwide, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1992), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1993), the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (1993), the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (2000), the Solomon R. Guggenheim (2007) in New York, organize exhibitions. Works by Richard Prince are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, as well as in London's Victoria & Albert Museum and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. In 1983 Richard Prince took part in the Biennale in Sao Paulo, in 1992 the artist was represented at Documenta IX in Kassel, and in 1993 and 2003 he was invited to the Venice Biennale. Richard Prince lives and works near New York.