22 November - 07 January 2006
“What do you see as your major influences?
The Canal Zone. Peach Street in Braintree, Mass. Zorro. Carving the word 'shit' on my desk in fifth grade. Getting to know how to make it come out of my cock in sixth grade. Steve McQueen and the two cars in the movie Bullitt. Watching Lee Harvey Oswald get shot on TV. The Vietnam war. Martin Luther King's assassination. Jackson Pollock. Lenny Bruce. Jimmy Piersol (he played baseball for the Boston Red Sox and he was mentally unstable). Touching the Berlin Wall in 1968. Rod Sterling. Hugh Hefner. What's My Line? Truth or Consequences. Who Do You Trust? The Ed Sullivan Show (all TV shows). Milton Bradley. Christian Metz. Lew Welch (a poet). Two Lane Blacktop (a movie). Woodstock. Procol Harum. Blonde on Blonde. Beach combing in Weymouth, Mass, when I was a teenager. West Side Story- especially the outfit Bernardo wore to the YMCA dance. The INs and OUTs of the New York Social Register. The fragrance counter at Sak's Fifth Avenue. Carol Shelby. The shininess of the Velvet Underground. The Beach Boys'. In My Room. The World of Video. Tons more. Tons.”
For his fourth exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Richard Prince presents new works: joke paintings, check paintings, American English sculptures and hippie drawings. This exhibition is accompanied by the publication of Richard Prince’s new artist’s book, Hippie Drawings.
Richard Prince interview, Like a Beautiful Scar On Your Head, Modern Painters, Special American Issue, Autumn 2002, Vol 15, No 3
23 April - 31 May 2003: Nurse Paintings
For his third exhibition for Sadie Coles HQ, Richard Prince presents a vivid new series of figurative paintings. The images use as their starting point the pulp fiction genre of medical romance novels. Scanning in the front covers of stories with Nurse in the title, Prince then applies deep 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 the vibrant background of passionate purples, greens and pinks and other more menacing, darker tones, the white of the nurses’ uniform takes on an almost supernatural glow, with the balance of light and dark making for a rich sense of drama, melodrama even. The nurse’s face mask is accentuated, protecting her anonymity and allowing her to become a cipher for the viewer’s fantasies. These paintings manifest a deep sense of nostalgia which draws on our collective view of the angel of mercy, an image from sixties America, but avoid becoming maudlin by retaining a hip edge.
While these paintings have their own distinctive aesthetic, they share many of the aspects that have characterised Richard Prince’s works – both photographic and painting - over the years. There is the element of pop appropriation that lies at the core of the Cowboys, Girlfriends or more recent Publicity photographs. And with his Joke paintings they share the use of borrowed text and low humour, while their literary connection highlights the artist’s bibliophile tendencies. The marriage of Prince’s recent high, painterly aesthetic with the low origins of the subject matter, has by no means led to a muted meeting on a middle ground. Each end holds its own, and they sit surprisingly easily together.
This exhibition will coincide with the publication of Richard Prince’s latest book, American English. Based around the artist’s collection of English and American First Editions, it offers an insight into the knowledge and obsession of the bibliophile and comes with a text by Prince, Bringing it all Back Home.
21 April - 26 May 2001
In a recent gallery exhibition in New York, the early photo appropriations of Richard Prince were shown together for the first time. Made in 1977-80, the works grouped together advertising images using the same compositional elements, such as Four Women Looking in the Same Direction. These important early works led to the fashion appropriations of the mid-eighties; compositions of motorcycle gangs and girlfriends; and the Marlboro cowboy appropriations that Prince continues to produce today.
For his second exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Richard Prince exhibits new photo appropriations. They include a greatly expanded Rolodex of material and continue his coolly anthropological examination of high and low culture. Cowboys, cowgirls, biker chicks, actors, porn stars and pop stars, the various heroes and villains of our culture, are assembled together in categories alongside Prince's own art and personal memorabilia. The photographic constructions play with our subconscious familiarity with the images from TV, film and pop music and the meaning associated with these pictures. A group of glossy autographed 8 x 10s of glamorous superstars are arranged to include a real-life image from Prince’s own codex of American sub-culture, provoking a discussion about the structures of visual convention and consumption.
Richard Prince lives and works Upstate New York.
8 April - 22 May 1999: Paintings 1988-1998
Richard Prince is one of America’s most influential contemporary artists. His appropriation of American white-trash culture includes his ‘girlfriends’ series taken from cult biker magazines, Marlboro cowboy advertisements, pop pin-ups and joke comics. What interests Prince is how the original readings of this source material have been transformed, exaggerated or in some cases divorced from their specific meaning through their adoption as a collective signifier in mass culture.
Prince has been making joke paintings since 1985 and the works in this exhibition range from 1988 to the present. The stale jokes, ‘I put an ad in a swingers magazine and my parents answered it’, effortlessly co-opt the viewer into their subversive melancholy. Together with the joke paintings, we are showing a new series of appropriated 8x10 publicity photographs, of stars such as Pamela Anderson, Kurt Cobain and Robert de Niro. These are autographed to the artist by his own hand, a sort of shortcut to familiarity that emphasizes the redundant originality of the star’s signature in a culture where an intimacy with our cultural icons is imagined.
A major retrospective of Richard Prince’s work was curated by the Whitney Museum, New York, in 1992 and toured to San Francisco, Rotterdam and Kiel. He lives and works in Albany, New York.