Richard Prince - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Friday, March 4, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay


    Richard Prince’s work is rich in layers of humor, perversity and the beauty of pop cultural imagery. Like the image of the Marlborough man he famously appropriated for his Cowboys series, this work refers to another omnipresent and clichéd, bit of American culture: the tire planter. Rather than looking to glossy billboards and magazines as a source, here, Prince pilfers the detritus of American folkcraft and thrift. Indigenous—but not limited to—the United States, he first became familiar with the tire planter when he purchased a country house in upstate New York in the late 1990s. “After we moved up here,” he said, “I started to notice three things common to people’s yards: the basketball hoop, the aboveground pool and the tire planter.” (D. Colman, “POSSESSED; A Retread With Mass Appeal,” The New York Times, October 5, 2003).
    Prince’s Untitled (Tire Planter) is a transformed castoff of a culture built upon mobility and consumption. The Tire Planter “stays fixed in our imagination, as a specific account of a white, middle-class, suburban way of pleasure and destruction, made by someone who knows that way intimately, knows why it’s terrible, knows why it’s irresistibly wonderful, and knows what we can conclude about art, about America, and about a self that has to live with both—from the fact that it exists at all” (J. Lewis, “Outside World,” Richard Prince, New York, 1992, p. 77) .

  • 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

18

Untitled (Tire Planter, black)

1999
Tire.
19 1/2 x 26 x 26 in. (49.5 x 66 x 66 cm).

Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000 

Sold for $80,500

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

4 March 2011
New York