Richard Prince - Contemporary Art London Friday, October 13, 2006 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles

  • Catalogue Essay

    “The Romantic philosophers associated comedy, like beauty, with the higher aesthetic values –the vertical, the ‘beyond’, the transcendental. By contrast, they linked tragedy with the lower aesthetic value of the earthbound. Comedy, they believed, is like a mirror, a reflection of the self, whereas tragedy is like a window, something one looks through and out of onto a spectacle of horror.

    Prince’s ‘Jokes’ aim to disabuse the viewer of this prevailing belief that comedy represents a form of transcendence; a way of bringing lightness to even the weightiest circumstances and events of life. He rejects the notion that cartoons are simply lighthearted fun. In fact, perhaps of all his artworks, the ‘Jokes’ reveal the space in which the intertwining of lightness and weight is most obvious. As Freud has demonstrated, there is often an element of hostility lurking within, a hidden ambition to demonstrate one’s superiority.” (R. Brooks, “A Prince of Lightness or Darkness?”, Richard Prince, London, 2003, p. 47)

  • 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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10

#7/ Just Married

1998
Acrylic, silkscreen, and conte crayon on canvas with predelum.
80 x 59 3/4 in. (203.2 x 151.8 cm).
Signed and dated “R Prince 1998” on the reverse.

Estimate
£120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for £220,800

Contemporary Art

14 Oct 2006, 7pm
London