Richard Prince - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited

    The University of Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Watery, Domestic, November 17-December 22, 2002

  • Catalogue Essay

    Mr. 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 ‘virtuoso real’, something beyond real that is patently fake. But his art is inherently corrosive; it eats through things. His specialty is a carefully constructed hybrid that is also some kind of joke, charged by conflicting notions of high, low and lower... [Borscht belt jokes] are a signature staple…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 colorful, 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
    What Can You Do?, completed in 2001, is a large-scale joke painting Richard Prince rendered on a smooth, powdery surface.The plush pastel hues shy away from his more stark, monochromatic paintings from earlier on in his career.The present lot embodies a more advanced take on his joke theme, employing a wider range of color that ultimately presents a composition more in tune with his painterly Nurse series and most resent de Kooning-esque Women series, where vivid colors and imagery coalesce. The joke itself, sprawled across the entire width of the canvas, is stenciled in place with a conviction for design; Prince’s large black Helvetica type breaks the canvas in two, yet simultaneously appears to meld each visual reference taking place before your eyes in a highly stylized and provocative manner.

  • 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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21

What Can You Do?

2001
Acrylic on canvas.
75 x 116 in. (190.5 x 294.6 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “R. Prince 2001 What Can You Do?” on the overlap.

Estimate
$1,500,000 - 2,000,000 

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York