“Some people say the nurse paintings are all about desire—but isn’t that more to do with their proximity to life and death? Isn’t that why we find nurses sexy—because they embody this ultimate contradiction?”

—Richard Prince

Suspenseful and psychologically charged, Richard Prince’s Killer Nurse, 2009–2010 stands as a striking exemplar of the artist’s iconic “Nurse” series, in which fetish, gender, authorship, and the American cultural subconscious are all interrogated through the borrowed façade of pulp fiction. Since the 1970s, Prince has pursued a distinctly subversive practice, appropriating familiar imagery—cowboys, biker girls, jokes—to expose the inner mechanics of desire and identity. In Killer Nurse, a lone masked figure stares from the canvas, set against a swirling storm of crimson and pink, beneath a sharply rendered title that hovers like neon signage from a slasher film. The visual experience evokes contradiction: the painting is seductive yet sinister, theatrical yet subdued, intimate yet evasive. Through calculated manipulation of appropriated imagery, Prince transforms a genre cliché into a loaded symbol of social anxiety and voyeuristic desire.

Widely considered one of Prince’s most seminal bodies of work, the “Nurse” paintings have been exhibited extensively, including in his mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2007 and 2008. Works from the series are held in major institutional collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Rubell Museum, Miami; and the Art Bridges Foundation, Bentonville, Arkansas. Nowhere in Prince’s oeuvre are the tensions between appropriation and authorship, seduction and subversion, more vividly staged than in the “Nurse” paintings. In Killer Nurse, he uses the language of pulp to expose the architecture of desire itself—its projections, its stereotypes, and its power to both mask and reveal.

“I’m painting nurses. I like their hats. Their aprons. Their shoes. My mother was a nurse. My sister was a nurse. My grandmother and two cousins were nurses. I collect ‘nurse’ books. Paperbacks. You can’t miss them. They’re all over the airport. I like the words ‘nurse’, ‘nurses’, ‘nursing’. I’m recovering.”

—Richard Prince

Created beginning in 2002, the “Nurse” paintings marked a shift in Prince’s method of appropriation. Rather than re-photographing pre-existing images as in his earlier work, Prince digitally scanned the covers of vintage pulp romance novels from his personal library, enlarged them, and transferred them to canvas via inkjet. He then applied vigorous layers of acrylic paint, obscuring much of the original illustration while enhancing its expressive charge. As seen in Killer Nurse, Prince’s sweeping brushwork and gestural overpainting efface nearly all identifying details from the source material—no background elements remain, and the book’s original title is replaced by his own stark, fabricated headline. This obliteration of authorial source epitomizes Prince’s long-standing effort to undermine notions of originality. He once described publicity images as “authorless pictures, too good to be true, art-directed and over-determined and pretty much like film stills, psychologically hyped-up and having nothing to do with the way art pictures were traditionally ‘put’ together.”ⁱ In Killer Nurse, Prince manipulates this type of “authorless” image to both indulge and unravel the fantasy it projects.

Rather than offering a nostalgic homage to pulp, Prince seizes on the genre’s exploitative tendencies—particularly its melodramatic, oversexed depictions of women in positions of care. Since his early career as a member of the Pictures Generation, coming to artistic maturity alongside figures like Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine, Prince has consistently interrogated the ways in which gender, sexuality, and identity are framed by media and cultural narrative. Here, the “Killer Nurse”—fetishized, infantilized, sexualized—becomes a conduit for Prince’s examination of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Just as he deconstructed masculine myths in his “Cowboys” series beginning in the 1980s, the “Nurse” paintings turn toward feminine archetypes—framing these subjects not as individuals, but as templates of desire, and then proceeding to destabilize those very projections through erasure, distortion, and exaggeration.

“Look at all the people today making things using sampled images, mashing up video clips and photographs in ways that feel incredibly common to us, no one does it like Richard. He changed art practice in the 20th century.”

—Nancy Spector

While some works in the series clearly mimic the covers of identifiable pulp novels, Killer Nurse is more elusive. No details of the original cover peek through, and “Killer Nurse” does not correspond to any known title. Still, the hotly flushed background and film noir ambiance echo the cover of Toni Remington’s 1967 novella Cindy: A Very Private Nurse, while the figure’s pose, expressive eyebrows, and sidelong glance recall Diane Frazer’s Nurse Lily and Mister X from 1961, in which the protagonist stares warily at a shadowy male figure. On the novel’s back cover, the tone of suspense is explicit: “Lily’s professional smile was frozen on her lips… [T]his was a man who had terrorized the White House, a man even the President was said to be afraid of…”ⁱⁱ In Killer Nurse, Prince removes the male antagonist altogether, heightening the tension by allowing only the trace of a presence. The narrative is now one of isolation and mystery, with the nurse left to occupy a space of psychological intensity on her own.

“With the Nurse paintings… I wanted to do something just white; I wasn’t really interested in the figures so much. I was interested in writing down next to the figure what could happen to you; it became very depressing all the things that could happen… But before I put them away, I made a mistake painting all this white—this is when I say I get lucky. After I had wiped some off the painting, it looked like a mask on the nurse’s face and suddenly it was one of those moments. When I noticed that I realized that was going to be my contribution to the image, to put a mask on these various nurse illustrations. It was a way of unifying and also talking about identity.”

—Richard Prince 

Central to this destabilization is the surgical mask—applied thickly and confidently, as if with a wide brush—that conceals the nurse’s nose and mouth entirely, rendering her silent. Prince has said the masks were a way of “making it all the same and getting rid of the personality.”ⁱⁱⁱ In this example, Prince sunders the nurse into a smudged pastiche of her original: her eyes are hyperbolized with rich kohl and dense eyelashes, her side-swept pin-up bangs are looser and more blunt, and her made-up lips and signature mole are completely erased by the addition of the mask. But in the act of erasure, the mask paradoxically intensifies her presence. Her heavily made-up eyes become the focal point of the composition—unreadable yet rapt, absorbed by something we, the viewer, cannot see. The crimson paint that drips below the mask like blood or tears further evokes violence, vulnerability, and the gothic overtones of slasher cinema. Prince plays with this ambiguity deliberately. “Some people say the nurse paintings are all about desire—but isn’t that more to do with their proximity to life and death? Isn’t that why we find nurses sexy—because they embody this ultimate contradiction?” he once remarked.^iv  The image flirts with stereotype but subverts it through distortion, concealment, and excess. The added mask silences but also spotlights; the Killer Nurse is both vixen and victim, caregiver and threat.

The expressive brushwork and color palette place Killer Nurse in conversation with mid-century abstraction. The stormy background, with its luminous fields of overlapping red and magenta, recalls the chromatic sublime of Mark Rothko, while the aggressive, almost violent handling of the paint gestures toward Willem de Kooning’s Women of the late 1940s and early 1950s—works often read as chaotic assaults on the female form. Prince, who paid direct homage to the postwar master in his “de Kooning” series from 2008–2009, adopts a similar push-pull dynamic of attraction and repulsion—invoking painterly machismo while subtly undermining it. His choice of subject—a figure coded as feminine, vulnerable, eroticized—is layered with irony. He deliberately assumes the position of the chauvinist, only to negate it through parody. By appropriating and overwriting these images with gestural abstraction, Prince collapses the boundaries between high art and kitsch, mass media and modernism, seduction and critique.

At the same time, Prince embraces the Pop strategies of isolation and recontextualization employed by artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who transformed the faces of film stars and comic-book heroines into cool, stylized icons. But unlike his Pop predecessors—whose renderings were marked by ironic detachment—Prince teases out the volatile undercurrents of latent sexuality and buried desire that simmer beneath the surface of these dime-store narratives. His “Nurses” are not flat or aloof, but raw, unstable, and fraught with psychological tension. The figure in Killer Nurse glows with the butter-yellow warmth of her hair and the scrubbed-pink tenderness of her skin, offset by the cool contrast of her eyes and the shadowy void that envelops her. Paint drips down the canvas like wet tears or blood, amplifying the emotional intensity. In Prince’s hands, the nurse becomes a cipher for broader cultural anxieties. The painting’s theatricality, suspense, and stylized violence evoke not only pulp fiction, but also film noir and horror cinema. 

Occupying a liminal space between beauty and dread, comfort and fear, Killer Nurse reveals how cultural narratives shape desire and distort perception. By manipulating found imagery, Prince exposes the mechanics of mass media and the archetypes it recycles. He lures the viewer with a familiar trope, only to confront them with its instability and artifice. In doing so, Killer Nurse stands as a haunting and essential work—one that seduces, provokes, and resists resolution, much like the masked figure at its center.

ⁱ Richard Prince, quoted in Jeffrey Rian, “Social Science Fiction: An Interview with Richard Prince,” Art in America, Vol.75, No. 3, March 1987.
ⁱⁱ “Nurse Lily and Mister X,” Vintage Nurse Romance Novels, March 9 2014, online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Richard Prince, quoted in Glenn O’Brien, “Richard Prince,” Interview Magazine, November 23 2008, online.
^iv Richard Prince, quoted in Richard Prince and Damien Hirst, “A Conversation,” Damien Hirst: Requiem II, Kiev, 2009, p. 26.