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Lot Essay
'The subject is radical--the idea of taking 'jokes' as a pictorial theme was really new, a virgin territory, untested waters. To draw them and then present them as your own art was to ask for a lot of understanding from the public. The materials used--canvas, stretcher, paint--were very traditional. That's the discipline'
(R. Prince, quoted in V. Duponchelle, 'Richard Prince: To Collect Is to Compare', Richard Prince, exh. cat., Galerie Patrick Seguin, Paris, 2008, p. 83).
Interlacing graphic imagery, text, and painterly gesture, Richard Prince's Untitled (The Band) appropriates the messages of several schools of art history: Minimalism, Expressionism and Pop Art, to create a work that gently tests our conventional understanding of the highly traditional medium of painting, while also reflecting wryly upon contemporary culture. Beneath the drips of chalky white that covers the entirety of the work, lies a tight collage of photographs of the rock group, The Band, who toured with Bob Dylan in the 1960s and 1970s. Superimposed above the textured surface is one of Prince's signature texts, creating a contemporary palimpsest of seemingly discordant materials.
The text is integral to the work; we read it as we look, although no causal relationship can be discerned between the constituent parts. In combining these various visual tools, Prince plays with notions of identity and authorship. He has appropriated jokes and popular imagery that have themselves taken on a life of their own, having been repeated and reinvented by comedians and by casual raconteurs alike. The dialogue regarding the nature of authorship, is crucial to the history of art and which has underpinned Prince's entire oeuvre. Untitled (The Band) was created in 2007, the same year that Prince's now famous de Kooning series of works was made. In those pictures, he spliced pornographic images with painterly passages derived from de Kooning's pictures. In this work, Prince has deliberately carried out a gleefully irreverent assault on the venerated fathers of American post-War art, deliberately echoing the dripping paint and grid like compositions found in Jasper Johns' 'Numbers' paintings, as well as the style of Jackson Pollock. By appropriating, imitating and gently mocking the earnestness of his art historical forefathers, Prince adeptly creates works of inventive cultural bricolage that remain unambiguously contemporary and distinctively his own.
(R. Prince, quoted in V. Duponchelle, 'Richard Prince: To Collect Is to Compare', Richard Prince, exh. cat., Galerie Patrick Seguin, Paris, 2008, p. 83).
Interlacing graphic imagery, text, and painterly gesture, Richard Prince's Untitled (The Band) appropriates the messages of several schools of art history: Minimalism, Expressionism and Pop Art, to create a work that gently tests our conventional understanding of the highly traditional medium of painting, while also reflecting wryly upon contemporary culture. Beneath the drips of chalky white that covers the entirety of the work, lies a tight collage of photographs of the rock group, The Band, who toured with Bob Dylan in the 1960s and 1970s. Superimposed above the textured surface is one of Prince's signature texts, creating a contemporary palimpsest of seemingly discordant materials.
The text is integral to the work; we read it as we look, although no causal relationship can be discerned between the constituent parts. In combining these various visual tools, Prince plays with notions of identity and authorship. He has appropriated jokes and popular imagery that have themselves taken on a life of their own, having been repeated and reinvented by comedians and by casual raconteurs alike. The dialogue regarding the nature of authorship, is crucial to the history of art and which has underpinned Prince's entire oeuvre. Untitled (The Band) was created in 2007, the same year that Prince's now famous de Kooning series of works was made. In those pictures, he spliced pornographic images with painterly passages derived from de Kooning's pictures. In this work, Prince has deliberately carried out a gleefully irreverent assault on the venerated fathers of American post-War art, deliberately echoing the dripping paint and grid like compositions found in Jasper Johns' 'Numbers' paintings, as well as the style of Jackson Pollock. By appropriating, imitating and gently mocking the earnestness of his art historical forefathers, Prince adeptly creates works of inventive cultural bricolage that remain unambiguously contemporary and distinctively his own.