23 April - 31 May 2003: Nurse Paintings
35 Heddon Street, London W1
Richard Prince's new figurative paintings take as their starting point the pulp fiction genre of medical romance novels. Scanning the front covers of stories with Nurse in the title, Prince applies layers of paint to the ink-jet surface, obscuring all other text and imagery so that only the nurse and her moniker remain – Surgical Nurse, Graduate Nurse, and so on. Against vivid backgrounds, the white of the nurses’ uniform takes on an almost supernatural glow. The nurse’s face mask is accentuated, protecting her anonymity and making her a cipher for the viewer’s fantasies. These paintings draw with nostalgia on our collective sense of the angel of mercy, an image from sixties America, but avoid becoming maudlin thanks to their hip edge.