Richard Prince's special issue for "Texte zur Kunst" entitled "Madame Butterfly" is based on a collage in which Prince paints an image taken from a porn magazine. The image shows a woman reclining on a stool with her legs spread. By rotating the photograph ninety degrees, the woman's posture looks like a bizarre contortion. Prince superimposes the outlines of a skull and a butterfly over her body. With two thick black strokes, he adds exaggeratedly large eyelashes. The painterly treatment keeps the image at bay, as it were, while the work draws just as substantially from the associative space opened by the pornographic motif and the subliminally aggressive overpainting that recurs in casual scribbles (translation from https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/artist-editions/richard-prince1/).
C-Print. Edition of 60+10 pieces, published by Texte zur Kunst. Signed and numbered on the back. Size approx 40*50 cm, frame approx 61*71 cm.
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Biography
Richard Prince (1949)
Prince studied at Nasson College, a private art school in Maine, USA. Starting in the late 1970s, he uses images from popular culture; mass media, advertising and the entertainment industry. He appropriates the images (appropriation, appropriation art) by re-photographing them, subtly changing the nature of the images, with the goal of making provocative art. Prince explores issues of racism, sexism and psychosis in the use of humor, the mythical status of cowboys, bikers and celebrities. In his most recent work, he looks at the appeal of pulp fiction and soft porn, whose use of existing images, incidentally, led to a number of lawsuits for copyright infringement.
Prince is counted among the Pictures Generation, a group of artists from the early 1970s who were engaged in the analysis of media culture. The principles of minimalism and conceptual art; creating art without emotional expressions, reduced to the purest and simplified elements or even just the idea (conceptual art), are applied by these artists to recognizable images. They explore how these images shape our perception of ourselves and the world. Whether Prince falls under this description of the Picture Generation can be disputed, interesting in this is to listen to a discussion of his painting Nurse Elsa(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a5WIOwEW-0).
Information from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Prince
https://gagosian.com/artists/richard-prince/
https://mocomuseum.com/nl/artiesten/richard-prince/94253
