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

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  • Provenance

    Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    The present lot is a vibrant painting that Richard Prince has termed a ‘Protest Painting.’ Painted on a canvas formed in the shape of a protest placard, Richard Prince erases any potential slogan’s with a lush, free, abstract paint drips and slashes.The work seems to be a wry look back by the artist at the 60s counterculture –a time he thoroughly participated in by attending its defining event: Woodstock.
     
    “For people of at least a certain generation,Yasgur’s farm is an enormously potent idea, a symbol of unlimited possibility. I don’t doubt that Prince shares a real emotional investment in the event that he in fact attended (and all that it stands for), but today he looks back at the concert’s traces spread out on his makeshift table and thinks it all looks a little remote, a little implausible, even a bit–he does not quite rush for the word-“lame.” For Prince, in short, the slogan is less victory cheer than a koan to muse on –a nugget of perplexity that resonates in all sorts of unexpected ways with the rhythms of packaging and permission he feels in his own predicament as an artist,” (J. Bankowsky, “Ciao Rensselaerville,” Richard Prince, New York, 2007, p. 341).

  • 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

8

Untitled (Protest Painting)

1994
Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas laid on board.
38 ½ x 18 in. (97.8 x 47 cm).
Signed and dated “R. Prince 1994” on the reverse.

Estimate
$180,000 - 220,000 

Sold for $134,500

Contemporary Art Part I

13 Nov 2008, 7pm
New York