Richard Prince - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 15, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gladstone Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, May 1 - July 12, 1992; Duseldorf, Kunstveriein, December 4, 1992 - January 20, 1992; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, October 3 - November 27, 1993, Richard Prince Retrospective; Hannover, Kestner Gesellschaft, Richard Prince Photographs, June 4 - July 24, 1994; Basel, Museum Für Gegenwartskunst, December 8, 2001 - February 24, 2002; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, April 27 - July 28, 2002, Richard Prince: Photographs, August 2001 - July 2002; Los Angeles, Regen Projects, Richard Prince: Women, February 19 - March 20, 2004

  • Literature


    Lisa Phillips, Richard Prince, New York, 1992, p. 54 (illustrated); B. Bü̈rgi, B. Ruff, and G. van Tuyl, Richard Prince: Photographs, New York, 2001, p. 108 (illustrated); Regen Projects, ed., Richard Prince: Women, Los Angeles, 2004, p. 69 (illustrated); N. Spector, Richard Prince, New York, 2007, p. 83 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay


    Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.B. Brecht
    …what is the break signaled by the “post” of postmodernism a break from? … while this new attention to media may describe the sort of historical turning point, specifically the rejection, that Pop Art and its postmodern successors marked from the modernist formal preoccupations of the previous part of the century, this localized account doesn’t particularly weigh the sense of shock that all forays of both mass culture and mass-produced objects into high art have created throughout the century – from Synthetic Cubism, Surrealism, the work of Duchamp, on through Pop Art to the present. Mass culture crossover, or, in Brecht’s terms, transforming what is already there – and what is more always already there than the media (now more than ever)? – always threatened to thrown into disarray the founding assumptions of the traffic in high culture, from the sanctity of individual authorship – and all that it guarantees for the market in cultural objects – to the class divisions inherent in the spatial and monetary distinctions between mass and high culture (if not the spatial and monetary distinctions between their different audiences).L. Kipnis, “Repossessing Popular Culture,” from Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics, Minneapolis, 1993, p. 15

  • Artist Biography

    Richard Prince

    American • 1947

    For more than three decades, Prince's universally celebrated practice has pursued the subversive strategy of appropriating commonplace imagery and themes – such as photographs of quintessential Western cowboys and "biker chicks," the front covers of nurse romance novellas, and jokes and cartoons – to deconstruct singular notions of authorship, authenticity and identity.

    Starting his career as a member of the Pictures Generation in the 1970s alongside such contemporaries as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine, Prince is widely acknowledged as having expanded the accepted parameters of art-making with his so-called "re-photography" technique – a revolutionary appropriation strategy of photographing pre-existing images from magazine ads and presenting them as his own. Prince's practice of appropriating familiar subject matter exposes the inner mechanics of desire and power pervading the media and our cultural consciousness at large, particularly as they relate to identity and gender constructs.

    View More Works

160

Untitled (Make-up)

1983
Ektacolor photograph.
20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm).

Signed and dated “R. Prince 1983” on the reverse.This work is from an edition of two plus one artist’s proof.

Estimate
$150,000 - 250,000 

Sold for $205,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 May 2008, 7pm
New York