Richard Prince

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.