Richard Prince - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Wednesday, February 11, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Barbara Gladstone, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Skarstedt Fine Art, Richard Prince Early Photographs 1977-1979, February – April, 2001 (another example exhibited); Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel – Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, 8 December, 2001 – 24 February, 2002; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 27 April – 28 July, 2002; Richard Prince: Retrospective (another example exhibited); New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 28 September, 2007 – 9 January, 2008; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 22 March – 15 June, 2008; London, Serpentine Gallery, June – September, 2008; Richard Prince: Spiritual America (another example exhibited)

  • Literature

    Exhibition catalogue, Skarstedt Fine Art, Richard Prince Early Photographs 1977-1979, New York, 2001, pp. 42-43 (illustrated); B. M. Burgi, B. Ruff, G. van Tuyl, eds., Richard Prince: Photographs, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002, pp. 38-39 (illustrated); Exhibition catalogue, Regen Projects, Richard Prince: Women, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004, no. 104 (illustrated); Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, New York, 2007, pp. 72-73 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Influenced through American commodity culture, Richard Prince has continuously explored the concepts of commercial imagery as the foundations for his artistic oeuvre.These explorations have come to define his bodies of work and have coined him as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, consistently challenging the concepts of contemporary culture within the genre of photography and painting.
    In Untitled (Four Women with Hats) executed in 1980, Prince systematically re-photographs fashion advertisements, all of which inhabit similar elements, such as the figures' poses, modes and dress, fusing the individual frames into a unified whole. On the onehand, Prince's use of pre-existing images becomes the core of thiswork, paying homage to the groundbreaking ideas of Marcel Duchamp and the concept of the ready-made. Whilst on the other hand, his pictorial ‘arrangement' as a filmstrip-like sequence, reminds us of Warhol's use of repetition, which we have encountered in those seminal paintings of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy in mourning.
    Basing this work of art on the four images, which he found in popular magazines, Prince infuses these once disposable images and liberates them from their initial function. He injects them with life and status and similarly to Duchamp takes authorship indeciding to re-use them as art.This in turn raises questions about originality and authorship – questions which lay at the core of the post-modern discourse and which continue to fascinate us and drive us to continue exploring the boundaries they present.

  • 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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23

Untitled (Four Women with Hats)

1980
Four Ektacolor prints.
Each: 50.8 x 61 cm. (20 x 24 in).
Each signed and dated ‘RPrince 1980' and numbered of ten on the reverse.This work is from an edition of ten plus two artist's proofs.

Estimate
£200,000 - 300,000 

Sold for £325,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

12 Feb 2009, 7pm
London