“I was in the tear-sheets department. At the end of the day, all I was left with was the advertising images, and it became my subject. Pens, watches, models—it wasn’t your typical subject matter for art.” – Richard Prince

Through his inventive appropriation and restructuring of images, Richard Prince deftly investigates the truth of the photographic fact and at once transforms its reality into a tale that unfolds before us. His reinvention of what it means to exercise authorship enables his works to resonate as much with the viewer as the artist. His deeply-felt influences of American culture and the contemporary commodity cannot be overstated—a vast amount of his material is sourced directly from found advertisements and photographs, and it is his use of these commercial sources that allows him to rewrite their contexts. The present lot, Untitled (Massage), is a particularly powerful early example of Prince’s remarkable ability to disrupt the unique photograph through visual syntax, arranging the images as a triptych to draw upon their multiplicity, and illustrating the ubiquity of imagery in the American consciousness.

In 1980, at age 31, Prince found himself employed in the tear-sheet department at Time/Life, and his exposure to these processes enabled him to formulate a practice that solidified his position as one of the most paradigmatic artists of the late twentieth century. Untitled (Massage) is comprised of three distinct photographs, each featuring a woman in a state of total relaxation, framed by a set of ambiguous hands planted firmly between her shoulder blades. Her pleasure is immediate and palpable, her eyes closed and hands resting squarely on the table, and yet we cannot help but feel perturbed by the anonymity of her masseuse. Untitled (Massage) sees the dawn of Prince’s soon-to-be hallmark style of cinematic flair and reveals a great deal about the artist’s dynamic and evolving relationship with his subjects and technique. Although Prince identifies his practice as essentially additive to the formal processes inherent to collage, “instead of ripping [a] page out and pasting it up, the gesture [is] photographing the page, but in a way that look[s] like a photograph” (Marvin Heiferman, “Richard Prince,” BOMB, issue 24, Summer 1988).