Richard Prince
Spiritual America
Introduction
This critical overview of Richard Prince's career is the most comprehensive examination of
the celebrated American artist's work to date. The exhibition highlights Prince's contributions
to the development of contemporary art, bringing together key examples of his
photographs, paintings, sculptures, and works on paper in an installation that integrates
the various series he has produced. more
Biography
Born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone, Richard Prince grew up in the Boston suburb
that his parents settled in five years later. In 1973, he moved to New York, where he
immersed himself in the downtown music and art scenes. While working in the tear-sheet
department of Time-Life, he began to photograph the discarded advertising pages,
carefully cropping out all copy until he was left with only formulaic images of consumer
aspiration such as watches, fountain pens, interior decor, logos, and fashion models.
He subsequently focused his camera on a series of stock figures so hopelessly clichéd
that they can be described as one-word archetypes: cowboys, girlfriends, and
entertainers. These appropriated images were displayed individually or sometimes
grouped within a single frame in a format that the artist refers to as a "gang." Simultaneously,
Prince began to appropriate old jokes from the annals of borscht-belt humor, pairing them
with renderings of unrelated, equally raunchy cartoons or spelling them out on otherwise
empty, monochrome backgrounds. more
