“Prince is by nature a provocateur. He continually jettisons the safety net of good taste and political correctness to show us the underlying facts of our most cherished fictions.”
—Nancy Spector

Executed in 2020, visually arresting in style and execution, Richard Prince presents six infantile creations that stare out from outside the canvas, generating curiosity and grabbing attention. Created from expressive strokes of bright contrasting colours each character stands alone, isolated in space and silhouetted against a vibrant blue background. Depicted with wide open eyes and broad gaping smiles, they create a simultaneously warm yet uneasy feeling of familiarity, conjuring memories of childish exuberance and mischief.

Inscribed by the artist with High Times on the reverse of the canvas, this painting identifies itself as belonging to an important series which incorporates learnings from over fifty years of cultural observation and artistic experimentation. The genre takes its title from a series of front covers that Prince was commissioned to create for a magazine of the same name. Here Prince combines the innocence and honesty that he saw within his kids’ drawings with the viewpoint of hippies which was a strong cultural reference of the time. A chance encounter with a Willem De Kooning catalogue in 2004 further fuelled his artistic experimentation. For whilst Prince’s hippie drawings had ’pose’ De Kooning paintings had ‘style’, Prince thus decided to have fun and combine the two.ⁱ The result was something which oscillated between the familiar and the utterly strange. The strong stylistic influences of De Kooning’s Woman and Bicycle are evident within Untitled, through the use of strong bright colour, distortion as well expressive and dynamic application of media.

Willem De Kooning, Woman and Bicycle, 1952-1953, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Within Untitled Prince uses modern inkjet technology to print an image on canvas before overlaying the printed image with oil stick and charcoal to add expression and personality. This painting represents a unique opportunity to acquire an object that is able to combine the richness of his artistic experience with the spontaneity and expression of American and European modern masters.

ⁱ Richard Hell, Richard Prince, Gagosian, Winter 2018 Issue, online.
- 來源
  香港私人收藏
  現藏者購自上述來源
- 藝術家簡介
  李察德．佩利斯
  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.
  瀏覽更多作品