Richard Prince - Contemporary Art Part I New York Monday, November 8, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    “But what is it about canceled checks?  Gathered together under even a princely eye they still make one flinch, like excavated body pits – pretty business-order maids all in a row.  Tattooed skin.  They have the same stubborn will to live as do supermarket receipts and photo-booth portraits.  Like bodies of lost loved ones in makeshift morgues, you keep looking, at some cellular level thinking you will finally come across a check that is your own.  When paired with 8 x 10s or posters or anything iconographic they’re particularly heart wrenching but then again just by themselves, stacked on a wash, or washed up on an abstracted sea of color, they are poignant and unfathomable, out of reach from our best forensic accountants, part of something modern and timeless and very old as well, of books that can never be balanced, our own Alexandrian library of bloggy, econo-diarist footprints.  Whatever makes us think we could balance the books?  From checks we come to checks we will return.” (B. Wagner, “Twilight Zone,” Richard Prince Check Paintings, New York, 2005, p. 7)

  • 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

111

Crazy Three

2004
Acrylic, ink and paper collage on canvas.
35 5/8 x 48 in. (90.5 x 121.9 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “R. Prince ‘Crazy Three’ 2004” on the reverse.

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $458,500

Contemporary Art Part I

8 November 2010
New York