Richard Prince
Description
Richard Prince (b.1949) emerged in the 1980s as one of America's new, highly innovative artists working with the margins of America's subcultures and visual debris. The appropriation and re-presentation of highly idiosyncratic subject matter - such as one-line jokes, off-colour cartoons, cowboys ('borrowed' from Marlboro ads) and motorcycle gangs - are essential to his work.
In the late 1970s Prince was working for the cutting services of
Time Life
publications in New York, where he had access to thousands of cut-up magazines in which only the advertisements remained intact. He began to re-photograph the advertisements and compose his own pictures from this highly familiar imagery, updating 1960s Pop art's homage to consumerism and its icons. Decades later, his career took an unexpected turn, and the artist emerged as a consummate painter, producing some of the most unusual and intensely admired works in the current painting scene.
Prince is one of America's best known artists and in 1992 was honoured with a one-person retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other museums that have held solo shows of Prince's work include the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, IVAM in Valencia and the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Prince's highly readable Interview with Jeff Rian ranges in its subject matter from rock and roll to folk art, from criminals to celebrities, as well as his experiences and history as an artist. In her Survey, Rosetta Brooks examines the variety in Prince's art through two key themes: the notion of artistic authenticity and the artist's construction of his own beguiling personality. Renowned photography critic Luc Sante takes a close look at one of Prince's best known and most disturbing series,
Girlfriends
, a confounding combination of sexiness and sexism. For his Artist's Choice Prince has selected the lyrics from "Fallen for You", a 1992 pop song by singer/songwriter Sheila Nicholls. Prince's signature laconic writing style is represented by autobiography, fiction, observations and confessions.
Reviews / Votes
On the Contemporary Artists Series"The boldest, best executed, and most far-reaching publishing project devoted to contemporary art. These books will revolutionize the way contemporary art is presented and written about."-Artforum
"The combination of intelligent analysis, personal insight, useful facts and plentiful pictures is a superb format invaluable for specialists but also interesting for casual readers, it makes these books a must for the library of anyone who cares about contemporary art."-Time Out
"A unique series of informative monographs on individual artists."-The Sunday Times
"Gives the reader the impression of a personal encounter with the artists. Apart from the writing which is lucid and illuminating, it is undoubtedly the wealth of lavish illustrations which makes looking at these books a satisfying entertainment."-The Art Book
More details
Persons
Jeff Rian is a writer and Professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes. He is an editor of Purple magazine, a regular contributor to Artforum and the author of Buckshot Lexicon (2000) and Lewis Baltz (Phaidon, 2001).
Luc Sante is the author of Low Life (1991), Evidence (1992), The Factory of Facts (1998) and Walker Evans (Phaidon, 2001), and co-editor of OK You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors (1999). He teaches Writing and the History of Photography at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.