Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Richard Prince. Following his critically lauded “Women” and “Man” shows, Prince will show a selection of new and old works, including painting, photography and sculpture, spanning the last twenty-five years of his career.
A master chronicler of American culture, Richard Prince's art foregrounds the desires inherent in lifestyle consumption, at every point on the spectrum. He is the ultimate undergrounder, keenly observing and mapping the terrain so coolly that his work is almost never what it seems. The unfolding that results penetrates our consciousness as a sleight of hand, so that Marlboro ads look like "cowboys" and the landscape of upstate New York looks like Prince's "inside world."
Richard Prince first gained critical attention in the early 1980s. His re-photographs of magazine advertisements redefined the autonomies of authorship and ownership and the very nature of representation. His redrawn "New Yorker" cartoons questioned the disparities between word and image, leading to an emphasis on text in which jokes, the substrata of a collective unconscious, became subject matter and an avenue for exploring the nature of painting. His hood paintings and sculptures bore pristine finishes and looked sent away for, with no trace of the artist's hand.
The photographs from the last decade have taken a different turn, representing the landscape of Upstate New York. In addition, Prince's series of "publicity" photographs have honed in on the nature of collecting, including canceled checks and his own writings collaged with inscribed celebrity photographs. This series anticipated the most recent series of "check" paintings, in which canceled checks layer the canvas and the signature is brought front and center.
Richard Prince has been curating exhibitions of his own work throughout his career, beginning with his Spiritual America Gallery in 1983 and culminating in the projects First House in 1993 and Second House, completed in 2003. “The thing is I really don’t see art. For me it’s there everyday. It’s a world, an inside world. And I like a world I can go in and out of when I’m done.”
A 244 page artist’s book relating to Second House will accompany the exhibition.
Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone and lives and works in Upstate New York. His work has been the subject of numerous one-person museum exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam; the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Kunsthalle Zurich and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. He will have an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in September 2005.