"The material I appropriate is available to anyone who cares to use it. The fact that the material has possibly been observed or unconsciously collected by person's other than myself, in effect defines its desires and threats." Richard Prince quoted on his website, 1977

Édouard Manet
Olympia, 1863
Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris
As one of the most provocative artists working today, Richard Prince is critically acclaimed for his remarkable artistic progression, having explored themes including appropriation, authenticity, and identity for more than three decades. After moving to New York City in 1973, Prince started to work in Time Life Publications’ (now Time Inc.) tear sheet department, cutting out editorials and adverts to prove to the contributing writers that their content had been published. At the end of each workday, Prince was left with an array of scraps featuring the clichés and patterns employed repeatedly in the contemporary language of advertising. Perfectly situated to embark upon his appropriation strategies, the artist reworked his collected images to introduce new interpretations, thus elevating their status to that of high art.

Pablo Picasso
Nude in a rocking chair, 1956
Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia
Executed in 2014, both works draw directly from vintage erotic photography, featuring the black-and-white image of a nude female, redesigned by Prince through the addition of juxtaposing collaged sections. Throughout the history of art, the representation of the female nude has a long trajectory of being explicitly constructed to appeal to the male gaze as an object of masculine desire. In the photographs Prince alters in both works, the artist cuts away at the models’ most alluring features, therefore revealing his hand-scrawled versions beneath. Nodding to both Édouard Manet’s controversially appropriated masterpiece Olympia, as well as Pablo Picasso’s semi-abstract depictions of the female body, Prince’s modified variants succeed in disrupting the viewer’s anticipated experience. In doing so, Prince’s audience is confronted with the implications of objectification as the artist introduces an entirely new aesthetic that instead, emphasises gesture and expression. Confirming the significance of Prince’s practice within the global art historical canon, his works are held in numerous prestigious museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, both in New York; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, amongst others.