Richard Prince

Richard Prince was recently honored with a 30 year retrospective at the Guggenheim in NYC.

We are thrilled to offer a cross-section of his most important iconography including cowboys, cars, naughty nurses and joke panels.

He selects his imagery from the guts of America’s media-driven culture; blue-collar consumerism combines with pulp fiction sexuality to create ironic but innocent, banal yet shocking visual icons. First achieving acclaim in the late 1970’s for ‘appropriating’ or re-photographing an existing advertising photograph (the famed Marlboro Man) he re-invented the artistic process, changing it from a purely creative endeavor to one of composing, editing and dismantling images. With Prince, advertisements stop being advertisements and instead became enticements of an entirely different sort – visual commentaries on consumerism and gender stereotypes. Home photos become grimy and voyeuristic snapshots into suburban America and even an innocent joke becomes a sarcastic narrative of the human experience. These “joke” paintings, as they have become known, have come to define a large part of Prince’s output and they exemplify why Richard Prince has become an icon of contemporary American art. At first glance, the work appears as an innocent abstraction before revealing the collaged chaos and subversive subject matter lying beneath the surface, much like the American experience.