Richard Prince - New Now New York Wednesday, September 27, 2023 | Phillips

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  • “I don’t see any difference between what I collect and what I make.”
     —Richard Prince 

     

    Best known for his appropriated imagery, Richard Prince’s Untitled (0114), 2010, is no exception. A testament to his practice of collecting images and remaking them as his own, Untitled (0114) features a nude woman sitting upon a bike, facing away from the viewer. Black and white scribbles are juxtaposed atop this racy imagery, both intentionally obfuscating elements of the image such as the woman’s face, while revealing other elements such as her arms and back.

     

    Prince was a key member of the Pictures Generation, a group of American artists who came of age in the early 1970s and who were known for their critical analysis of media culture and appropriation of images. This deconstruction of mass consumerism is particularly evident in Untitled (0114), which relates to Prince’s Cartoon series, begun in 1984, in which the artist repurposed illustrations from The New Yorker and Playboy Magazine, combining pre-existing images with his own graffiti-like overlaid drawings. It also contains visual similarities to Prince’s Cowboys and Girlfriends series, which featured an array of rephotographed vernacular snapshots from motorcycle culture magazines; specifically, the series depicted biker chicks and their boyfriends drinking, undressing, and suggestively posing on motorcycles. Untitled (0114) is thus a striking combination of Prince’s propensity for superimposed drawing with his reusage of commonplace imagery – specifically representations of women in mass media.

     

    “His specialty is a carefully constructed hybrid that is also some kind of joke, charged by conflicting notions of high, low and lower,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith explains.“His work disturbs, amuses and then splinters in the mind. It unsettles assumptions about art, originality and value, class and sexual difference and creativity.” In constructing hybrid images such as Untitled (0114), Prince continues to interrogate notions of originality, allowing him to remain one of the most innovative artists of the past 30 years.

     

     

    i Roberta Smith, “Pilfering a Culture out of Joint,” The New York Times, Sep. 28, 2007, online.

    • Provenance

      Gagosian Gallery, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011

    • Exhibited

      New York, Gagosian Gallery, Richard Prince: Four Saturdays, October 25–November 17, 2012

    • 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

149

Untitled

signed and dated "Richard Prince 2010" on the overlap
inkjet on canvas
45 x 45 in. (114.3 x 114.3 cm)
Executed in 2010.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000 

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now Sale 
T +1 212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 27 September 2023