Richard Prince - New Now New York Tuesday, September 28, 2021 | Phillips
  • "It was time to pay homage to an artist I really like. Some people worship at the altar—I believe in de Kooning." —Richard Prince

    Untitled (with de Kooning), 2006, exemplifies Richard Prince’s unabashed incorporation of subjects culled from life into his art. Prince pays tribute to Willem de Kooning as he blurs the boundaries between admirer and artist, blending elements of de Kooning’s works with his own. Prince combines magazine cutouts taken from adult magazines with imagery from de Kooning’s Woman paintings of the 1950s, engaging with the Abstract Expressionist’s work in ways both ironic and inventive. Evoking de Kooning’s own artistic appropriations, Prince seizes his predecessor’s work in daring style.

    "I have always liked de Kooning’s Women paintings. It started off with a book of his, And I just started drawing on it… after I did the books, I started to make collages. So, it’d be like one of his women on the left, and one of my men on the right… You know, it’s just kind of a new way of dealing with the figure, this idea of the photographic part and the drawing part fused together." —Richard Prince

    Borrowing from the vernaculars of advertisement, popular culture, and art history, Prince’s shrewd recontextualizations of found media raise questions of ownership, authorship, and reproduction. Prince embarked on his career as a member of the Pictures Generation in the 1970’s, pioneering a new style of artistic “re-photography” that tests the boundaries of exclusivity and agency; the present work drives this exploration forward as it incorporates Prince’s interest in popular imagery—largely of men, subjecting the Woman paintings to yet another distortion—with his reverence for the work of Willem de Kooning. With a knowing nod to the controversy that de Kooning’s work generated in the New York art world at the time, Prince similarly pushes the boundaries of art making by transforming his forebears’ women into hybrid subjects. Beyond merging male and female anatomies, Prince blurs the boundaries of painting with photography and print—creating an explosive work in which "high" and "low" art collide with undeniable immediacy.

    • Provenance

      Gladstone Gallery, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Artist Biography

      Richard Prince

      American • 1947

      For more than three decades, Prince's universally celebrated practice has pursued the subversive strategy of appropriating commonplace imagery and themes – such as photographs of quintessential Western cowboys and "biker chicks," the front covers of nurse romance novellas, and jokes and cartoons – to deconstruct singular notions of authorship, authenticity and identity.

      Starting his career as a member of the Pictures Generation in the 1970s alongside such contemporaries as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine, Prince is widely acknowledged as having expanded the accepted parameters of art-making with his so-called "re-photography" technique – a revolutionary appropriation strategy of photographing pre-existing images from magazine ads and presenting them as his own. Prince's practice of appropriating familiar subject matter exposes the inner mechanics of desire and power pervading the media and our cultural consciousness at large, particularly as they relate to identity and gender constructs.

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Property from a Private Collection, California

Ο102

Untitled (with de Kooning)

signed and dated "Richard Prince 2006" center left
Ektacolor photograph, printed paper collage, acrylic and oil crayon on board
46 x 58 in. (116.8 x 147.3 cm)
Executed in 2006.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for $119,700

Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig

Head of New Now Sale

212 940 1279

pkoenig@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 28 September 2021