Richard Prince - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Saturday, June 28, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

  • Literature

    B. Mendes, B. Ruf and G. van Tuyl, eds., Richard Prince, Paintings, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002, p. 81 & 118 (illustrated); N. Spector, ed., Richard Prince, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2007, n.p (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    "In his permutative reorganization of image and language contexts, Prince turns the joke into the painter's signature in the authentic medium of art, this signifying painting itself as a paradoxical joke..." (B. Burgi, B. Ruf and G. van Tuyl, Richard Prince: Paintings and Photographs, Germany, 2002)
    Richard Prince made his reputation as the master of the deadpan mode, teasing viewers with the promise that the essence of the American psyche might be discovered in cigarette advertisements, the back pages of cult magazines and the banalities of dirty jokes and cartoons. Helping to shape Prince's prolific and varied body of work, his famous Joke Paintings have been appearing since as early as the mid 1980s. Having created Jokes first on paper, they quickly seemed to evolve onto works on canvas that were silk-screened, some with hand-drawn marks produced by the artist in charcoal and marker. Spanning over the last 20 years, Richard prince's Joke Paintings have become his most signature body of work, continuously exploring the juxtaposition between image and text.
    The present lot, What a Kid I Was #2 is a prime example of the artist's early body of work. Prince has "devoted his career to this surface unreality, attempting to collect, count and order its ways. He has said that his goal is a ‘virtuose real', something beyond real that is patently fake. But his art is inherently corrosive... [if] appearing on modernist monochromes, on fields of checks and as arbitrary punch lines for postwar New Yorker or Playboy cartoons. These examples of a better class of humor are variously whole, fragmented, steeped in white or piled into colourful, nearly abstract patterns yet still retain their familiarity. The same jokes occur in different works, alternately writ big or little, sharp or fading, straight or rippled as if spoken by someone on a bender. (R. Smith, ‘Pilfering From a Culture out of Joint', the New York Times, September 28, 2007)

  • 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.

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220

What a Kid I Was #2

1989
Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas.
190.5 x 147.3 cm. (75 x 58 in).
Signed, titled and dated ‘What a Kid I Was #2 R.Prince 1989' on the overlap.

Estimate
£400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for £505,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

29 June 2008, 5pm
London