Description

Richard Prince emerged in the 1980s as one of America's new, highly innovative artists who worked with the margins of American subcultures and visual debris. Highly idiosyncratic subject matter - such as one-line jokes, cartoons, cowboys (borrowed from the Marlboro ads) and motorcycle gangs - are central to his work. In the late 1970s Prince was working for the cutting services of Time Life publications in New York, and had access to thousands of cut-up magazines of which only the advertisements remained intact. He began to re-photograph the advertisements and compose his own pictures from this highly familiar, Pop imagery - updating Pop Art's homage to consumerism and its icons in the 1960s. Recently Prince's work has taken an unexpected turn, and the artist has emerged as a consummate painter, producing some of the most unusual and admired works in the current painting scene.