Continuation
Richard Prince
Continuation
Serpentine Gallery
26 June 2008 - 7 September 2008
Richard Prince
Covering Hannah (1987 Grand National), 2008
248.9 x 332.7 cm
© 2008 Richard Prince
Richard Prince is an artist who shot to international fame in the 1980s. He is renowned for his appropriation of adverts, trashy novels and bad jokes - elements of American consumer culture that allow him to filter the American dream. Some might also like to cast him as “the one who got rich through stealing the image of the Marlboro Man”. Continuation, at the Serpentine Gallery, is a show Prince has curated himself, in collaboration with the gallery’s directors.
Many of the works in the show are previously unseen, and Prince, we are told, has curated these works from his own collection in a way that mirrors their display in his own studios. Upon reading this, one might expect to witness a dynamic, rough and ready arrangement of works. Contrarily, the works are genteelly and spaciously arranged, and the gallery itself, a Neo-Classical pavilion in its picturesque chocolate box setting, is partly responsible. The entrance to the exhibition is a delicately lit hall of fame for Prince’s mutely coloured, lightly painted cast car bonnets. The artist plays off the gallery’s teahouse of British politeness in his presentation of all that is macho American. His life-size working model of a vintage car pushes the boundaries in this vein, pimped all over with semi-pornographic images from his ‘Girlfriends’ series.
For Prince, the car is an important allusion to the freedom of the open road; the exhilarating American landscape. The same goes for his now infamous enlarged photographs of original Marlboro cowboy campaign shots – one of which earned him £1.7m – the highest price ever paid for a photograph, to date. Beyond the hotly debated critical and moral issue of appropriation, however, Prince’s cowboy series is about the Romantic demise of the American dream. The cowboys furiously traverse the open prairie planes, and, freed from the logos and lettering of Marlboro advertising, we longingly re-imagine their destination ad infinitum.
Richard Prince
Untitled (cowboy), 1989
Ektacolor photograph
127 x 178 cm
© 2008 Richard Prince
Continuation takes us on a fascinating visual journey through a largely masculine Americana, told by an artist who in the 1970s worked as a picture-clipper for Time-Life magazine. Prince is both a collector and an artist and this is a wide-ranging exhibition about his fascination with image production and consumer desire – between seedily slathered canvases based on his collection of naughty-nurse literature and his new paintings that playfully appendage limbs to the painted women of renowned Modernist artist, Willem De Kooning.
This article was published in The Oxford Times on 15 August 2008
Continuation
Serpentine Gallery
26 June 2008 - 7 September 2008
Richard Prince
Covering Hannah (1987 Grand National), 2008
248.9 x 332.7 cm
© 2008 Richard Prince
Richard Prince is an artist who shot to international fame in the 1980s. He is renowned for his appropriation of adverts, trashy novels and bad jokes - elements of American consumer culture that allow him to filter the American dream. Some might also like to cast him as “the one who got rich through stealing the image of the Marlboro Man”. Continuation, at the Serpentine Gallery, is a show Prince has curated himself, in collaboration with the gallery’s directors.
Many of the works in the show are previously unseen, and Prince, we are told, has curated these works from his own collection in a way that mirrors their display in his own studios. Upon reading this, one might expect to witness a dynamic, rough and ready arrangement of works. Contrarily, the works are genteelly and spaciously arranged, and the gallery itself, a Neo-Classical pavilion in its picturesque chocolate box setting, is partly responsible. The entrance to the exhibition is a delicately lit hall of fame for Prince’s mutely coloured, lightly painted cast car bonnets. The artist plays off the gallery’s teahouse of British politeness in his presentation of all that is macho American. His life-size working model of a vintage car pushes the boundaries in this vein, pimped all over with semi-pornographic images from his ‘Girlfriends’ series.
For Prince, the car is an important allusion to the freedom of the open road; the exhilarating American landscape. The same goes for his now infamous enlarged photographs of original Marlboro cowboy campaign shots – one of which earned him £1.7m – the highest price ever paid for a photograph, to date. Beyond the hotly debated critical and moral issue of appropriation, however, Prince’s cowboy series is about the Romantic demise of the American dream. The cowboys furiously traverse the open prairie planes, and, freed from the logos and lettering of Marlboro advertising, we longingly re-imagine their destination ad infinitum.
Richard Prince
Untitled (cowboy), 1989
Ektacolor photograph
127 x 178 cm
© 2008 Richard Prince
Continuation takes us on a fascinating visual journey through a largely masculine Americana, told by an artist who in the 1970s worked as a picture-clipper for Time-Life magazine. Prince is both a collector and an artist and this is a wide-ranging exhibition about his fascination with image production and consumer desire – between seedily slathered canvases based on his collection of naughty-nurse literature and his new paintings that playfully appendage limbs to the painted women of renowned Modernist artist, Willem De Kooning.
This article was published in The Oxford Times on 15 August 2008
posted by Claire Nichols at 4:46 PM
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