Richard Prince Continuation Cowboys Photography

Richard Prince: Continuation 26 June - 7 September 2008. Lees meer ...

Richard Prince (born 1949) is one of the world’s most celebrated artists and artistic innovators.
Prince came to prominence in the 1980s through his celebrated series such as Cowboys, Jokes and Hoods, which appropriate images from magazines, popular culture and pulp fiction to create new photographs, sculptures and paintings that respond to ideas about American identity and consumerism. These works have been critical in challenging ideas of authorship and raising questions about the value of the ‘unique’ artwork.

Prince is, himself, a voracious collector of art, furniture, memorabilia and books, which he houses in a group of buildings alongside his own artworks. His exhibition at the Serpentine is a direct dialogue with his spaces, mirroring the installation of Prince’s work in his own buildings as well as responding to the Serpentine’s unique scale and location. Prince’s diverse collection ranges from books and artworks by artists and writers to classic American ‘muscle cars’. Paintings, photographs and sculptures spanning Prince’s 30-year career are featured at the Serpentine, including new work created especially for this exhibition.

Richard Prince: Continuation follows his recent retrospective, Spiritual America, organised by the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, and is curated by Richard Prince and the Serpentine Gallery.

In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements, featuring gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them, using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. In so doing, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the images, revealing them as hallucinatory fictions of society's desires.

Untitled (Cowboy) is a high point of the artist's ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as timely as then-outgoing president Ronald Reagan. Prince's picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Perpetually disappearing into the sunset, this lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, Untitled (Cowboy) is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture's continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience.