Richard Prince - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 13, 2008 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay


    Martha Stewart he isn’t.
    Indeed, one could argue that the artist Richard Prince is a patent foil to Ms. Stewart’s brand of relentlessly reassuring, old-fashioned country charm. Mr. Prince’s work is rich in layers of humor, perversity and pop beauty, borrowing from advertising imagery—most famously from Marlboro Man campaigns -- and Elks Club-style joke books. (“He said he was interested in humiliation,” reads one painting, “so I stood him up.”)
    Appropriately, his favorite thing reeks not of cheery nostalgia, but of his suburbane wit: it is that ubiquitous and homegrown bit of sculpture, the tire planter. Indigenous (but not limited) to the United States, where car culture was born, the tire planter worked its way into the artist’s heart six years ago when he bought a country house in upstate New York.
    “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.”
    There is nothing ironic about Mr. Prince’s special rubber fetish. For him, tire planters are a cheap and charming local idiom, an inland version of the beachcomber’s driftwood. “They kind of remind me of flower power,” he said, “And having participated in the original Woodstock, that’s my generation.”
    He allowed, though, that his peers might differ some. “It’s not the kind of thing that my contemporaries would go and put in their yards,” he said. “They’re not a Martha Stewart thing, but there they are.”
    D. Colman, “POSSESSED; A Retread With Mass Appeal,” The New York Times, October 5, 2003

  • 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

6

Untitled (Tire Planter)

1999
Rubber tire and paint.
13 x 26 x 26 in. (33 x 66 x 66 cm).

Estimate
$120,000 - 180,000 

Contemporary Art Part I

13 Nov 2008, 7pm
New York