Richard Prince
Biography
"I seem to go after images that I don’t quite believe and I try to re-present them even more unbelievably".
Richard Prince is one of the most influential American artists alive today, whose pioneering oeuvre is primarily associated with Appropriation Art. He has pushed the boundaries of authorship and authenticity within art since the late 1970s. Working with photography and painting, he is best known for adapting images from movies, advertising and mass media while constructing his own idiosyncratic vocabulary consisting of other visual and cultural registers. His critical work uses kitsch and appropriation to examine the role of mythical figures including celebrities, cowboys or bikers in the construction of American national mythology, identity and prescient issues around gender and race.
Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone and grew up in Massachusetts. The Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock was an early inspiration for him. He moved to New York City in 1977, where working for Time-Life magazine, he started creating artworks by re-photographing and manipulating images from newspapers and advertisements.
As a spearheading figure of Appropriation Art, Prince started adapting and recontextualising iconic American images within a critical, subversive aesthetic framework. A famous example is his Cowboys series from the 1980s, which were directly lifted from the advertisement campaign of the cigarette brand Marlboro. By appropriating the symbol of the cowboy, Prince comments on themes around American masculinity, the romanticisation of the wild west landscape, cultural imperialism in the Cold War era and its relationship to capitalism. His work was considered provocative and often controversial due to concerns around artistic ownership
His Jokes series in the late 80s and early 90s featured satirical one-liners and cliche references to stand-up comedy and burlesque humour, charged with heavy irony. This playful body of work pokes fun at the fantasies and frustrations of white, middle-class Americans. The series sees the artist use typography and colour alone to create an impact.
In the early 2000s, Prince created his famous Nurse Paintings, that saw the artist scan the covers of pulp fiction books, transferring them to canvases and obscuring everything except the title and the nurse figures by applying layers of acrylic paint as a mark of artistic authenticity.
In 2007, the Guggenheim hosted a large-scale retrospective of Prince’s works, which travelled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Serpentine Gallery, London, until 2008. Many notable solo presentations followed at renowned institutions including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2011), the Picasso Museum in Spain (2012) and the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2014).
In 2014, Prince unveiled the New Portraits series at the Gagosian gallery in New York City, which reflected his enduring interest in appropriation within media and celebrity culture. The images of various actors, models and artists were all lifted from his Instagram feed, including some suggestive and topless shots.
Prince’s works are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Fine Arts Collection, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Prince currently lives and works in New York.
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