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b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone
Born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone, Richard Prince grew up in the Boston suburb where his parents settled 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 rephotograph the discarded advertising pages, carefully cropping out all copy until only formulaic images of consumer aspiration remained—interior decor, luxury goods, product logos, and fashion models. Drawing inspiration from the mainstream mass media as well as various American subcultures, Prince subsequently focused his camera on a series of stock figures so hopelessly clichéd that they could be described by one–word archetypes—Cowboys, Girlfriends, and Entertainers. These appropriated photographs were displayed individually, in serial groupings, or combined within a single sheet in a format that the artist refers to as a Gang. Simultaneously, he began to hand copy cartoons and old jokes from the annals of Borscht Belt humor, pairing the images with unrelated jokes, or spelling out the text of the gag line on otherwise empty, monochrome backgrounds.
As his career has progressed, Prince has brought an increasingly expressionistic sensibility to bear on his appropriated imagery and texts, producing resolutely painterly canvases. Although still present, the jokes are now muted by gestural fields of layered paint and, in some cases, are part of compositions comprising grids of collaged bank checks, stock photography, or vintage pornography. Prince's Hood sculptures, painted muscle-car hoods that initially sported a slick, commercial finish, now function as supports for expressionistic hand painting. In 2002 the artist initiated Nurses, a series of canvases derived from the pulpy cover designs of medical romance novels, rendered in dripping, lurid colors save for the figures' white uniforms and surgical masks. His most recent body of work—a series of interactions with the iconography of Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning—has extended this register of painterly figuration.
In recent years, Prince has drawn inspiration from the small-town milieu of his current base in upstate New York, which he has documented in a series of original photographs, Untitled (upstate). Environmental installations, such as the Spiritual America Gallery in downtown Manhattan (1983–84), the First House (1993) in Los Angeles, and the Second House (2001–2007) in Rensselaerville, New York, have long formed a key aspect of Prince's practice, and a private library and fully operational industrial "body shop" have recently been added to his network of projects upstate.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Artists Space, New York (1980); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1983); IVAM Centre del Carmen, Valencia (1989); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992); Kunstverein Düsseldorf (1992-93); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1993); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1993); MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; MAK Gallery, Vienna (2000); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001-2002); Kunsthalle Zürich (2002); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2002); Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2004-2005); Goetz Collection, Munich (2004-2005); Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2007)
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, A Fatal Attraction: Art and the Media (1982); Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Philadelphia, Image Scavengers (1982-83); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Language, Drama, Source, and Vision (1983); Whitney Museum of American Art, Downtown Branch, New York, Phototypes: The Development of Photography in New York City (1983); ARC/Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, New York: Ailleurs et Autrement (1984-85); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Biennial Exhibition (1985); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, The Art of Memory/ The Loss of History (1985-86); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, The 6th Biennial of Sydney (1986); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Biennial Exhibition (1987); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography (1988); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation (1989); Kassel, Documenta IX (1992); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Birth of the Cool: American Painting from Georgia O'’Keeffe to Christopher Wool (1997); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Examining Pictures (1999); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Let’'s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures (2000); Royal Academy of Arts, London, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art (2000); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Imagine, You are Standing Here in Front of Me (2002-2003); Venice Biennale, The 50th International Venice Biennale (2003); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Biennial Exhibition (2004); Palazzo Grassi, Sequence 1: Painting and Sculpture in the François Pinault Collection (2007)
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