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

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  • Provenance

    Regen Projects, Los Angeles;

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Art is the joke’s joke. It’s what the other jokes are laughing at.” (G. O’Brien, “The Joke of the New,” taken from L. Phillips, ed., Richard Prince, New York, 1992) Prolific, versatile, and possessed of a caustic wit, since the late 1970s Richard Prince has staked his storied career on keeping art world pretensions in his crosshairs. Most famous (or infamous) are his slyly subversive conceptual and minimalist jabs to the ribs: “joke paintings” which recontextualize clichéd dime-store humor as the block-letter punch lines of brutally simple compositions whose pointed critique sounds a whole lot like the hiss of air escaping from the over-inflated sense of self-importance that all too often surrounds contemporary painting as a medium and institution. “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) More recently, Prince’s “protest paintings” have demonstrated his propensity for not only pop-cultural appropriation but the recycling of his own motifs as well: the same shopworn jokes reappear as the subject of these paintings, but in a different context, as Prince’s “protest paintings” take the form of the signs and placards so common to protest rallies and demonstrations. In Untitled (Protest Painting) (1994), the age-old minister-rabbi-priest pleasantry is double-printed, silkscreened upside down and backward, and practically drowned out by the white noise of found patterns and details that surround it. So dripping with irony is Prince’s comment on political correctness that one might imagine the paint to have never fully dried, yet in a sense Prince offers up this legitimate token of protest with a straight face: one more shot across the bow of the institutions who would take his “jokes” seriously, oblivious to the intent of one of art’s preeminent pranksters that the joke be on them.

  • 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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3

Untitled (Protest Painting)

1994
Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas (in five parts).
38 1/4 x 18 in. (97.2 x 45.7 cm).
Signed and dated “R. Prince 1994” on the reverse.

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Sold for $385,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York