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Lot Essay
'It was time to pay homage to an artist I really like... Some people worship at the altar - I believe in de Kooning.'
(Prince, quoted in S. Daly, Daily Dreamtime, November 2007).
Richard Prince's Untitled (with de Kooning) is both homage and humorous desecration. Painted in 2006, it belongs to a cycle of works that wrangle the biomorphic figuration of Willem de Kooning with the photographic obscenities of hard-core porn. The series is a significant one for Prince as it applies his strategies of appropriation to another artist's work for the very first time. "It was time to pay homage to an artist I really like," Prince explains. "Some people worship at the altar - I believe in de Kooning." (Prince, quoted on S. Daly, Daily Dreamtime, November 2007).
Prince is probably best known for re-photographing and re-presenting images and text from mass media sources. These methods of mediation typically allow Prince to keep a cool distance from his subjects. Yet this remarkably expressive painting is filled with spontaneous, gestural, brushstrokes that speak of the passionate and immediate engagement of the artist. The composition's painterly verve is nonetheless a form of quotation, readily borrowing the visual vocabulary of de Kooning's canonical Women paintings in much the same way that Prince's Joke paintings repeat the printed word.
The de Kooning series was instigated when Prince began drawing into a book of the elder painter's works. These doodles evolved into collage mash-ups with dismembered girlie magazines, which have been blown up onto canvas via inkjet printer. Prince then paints over most, if not all, of the original material, using it as a basis for his experiments with pigment and compositional elements. This complicated process of selection, addition and adaption can be seen as a continuation of de Kooning's own practice. The modern master famously pasted a mouth culled from a cigarette advertisement onto one of his Women paintings and Prince is taking this idea to a new extreme, riffing on the sexually suggestive nature of de Kooning's wild sirens. At once titillating and disturbing, this laughably grotesque trio are hybrids on a number of levels. They merge the male with the female, painting with photography, and the refinement of high art with decidedly low-culture leanings. Thus the work flaunts all the elements that have provided Prince with his notoriety - the hint of sleazy sex, the 'theft' of pop-culture imagery, and an ironic commentary on the infatuations of American society.
(Prince, quoted in S. Daly, Daily Dreamtime, November 2007).
Richard Prince's Untitled (with de Kooning) is both homage and humorous desecration. Painted in 2006, it belongs to a cycle of works that wrangle the biomorphic figuration of Willem de Kooning with the photographic obscenities of hard-core porn. The series is a significant one for Prince as it applies his strategies of appropriation to another artist's work for the very first time. "It was time to pay homage to an artist I really like," Prince explains. "Some people worship at the altar - I believe in de Kooning." (Prince, quoted on S. Daly, Daily Dreamtime, November 2007).
Prince is probably best known for re-photographing and re-presenting images and text from mass media sources. These methods of mediation typically allow Prince to keep a cool distance from his subjects. Yet this remarkably expressive painting is filled with spontaneous, gestural, brushstrokes that speak of the passionate and immediate engagement of the artist. The composition's painterly verve is nonetheless a form of quotation, readily borrowing the visual vocabulary of de Kooning's canonical Women paintings in much the same way that Prince's Joke paintings repeat the printed word.
The de Kooning series was instigated when Prince began drawing into a book of the elder painter's works. These doodles evolved into collage mash-ups with dismembered girlie magazines, which have been blown up onto canvas via inkjet printer. Prince then paints over most, if not all, of the original material, using it as a basis for his experiments with pigment and compositional elements. This complicated process of selection, addition and adaption can be seen as a continuation of de Kooning's own practice. The modern master famously pasted a mouth culled from a cigarette advertisement onto one of his Women paintings and Prince is taking this idea to a new extreme, riffing on the sexually suggestive nature of de Kooning's wild sirens. At once titillating and disturbing, this laughably grotesque trio are hybrids on a number of levels. They merge the male with the female, painting with photography, and the refinement of high art with decidedly low-culture leanings. Thus the work flaunts all the elements that have provided Prince with his notoriety - the hint of sleazy sex, the 'theft' of pop-culture imagery, and an ironic commentary on the infatuations of American society.