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Lot Essay
In Richard Prince’s 2011 Untitled, a collaged band of women dance, lounge, and parade themselves across the canvas in a shameless spectacle. A prime example of Prince’s distinguished appropriation, the present lot comes after the artist’s de Kooning series -- works Prince developed after leafing through a catalogue of the abstract expressionist’s Women series and scribbling adjunct effigies atop the figures. Blurring the line between homage and pilferage, Prince chooses found images, grossly enlarges them, and prints his cropping onto canvas via inkjet printer. Annotating his findings, Prince scribbles additional extremities and silhouettes onto his subjects in charcoal, alters visages in pastel, and highlights genitalia in oil crayon. With Untitled, Prince’s montage of dismembered women contribute not only to his personal oeuvre of altered “stolen” imagery but also to the canonical art historical theme of the female nude.
Without clear depth of field or scale, these human-like forms are less representations of the female beauty and more compilations of Prince’s talent as a mixed media collagist. Prince defines his black and white nudes by their modifications, combining classic print soft pornographic imagery with his child-like, gestural line. With each obscuring mark of his hand, Prince further distances his work from that of the original photographs. In this sense, he further objectifies the original subjects by using the figures as a vehicle to display his signature artistic mastery of appropriation. This process is intensified by Prince’s mixed-media approach utilizing both inkjet printing technologies and the human hand. The result is the motley crew of multi-limbed, anthropomorphic females reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Henri Matisse’s Dance, and the work’s referent, de Kooning’s Woman series. These mutants stand as a consummation of Prince’s infamousness, motifs of sensuality and sexuality, subjectivity and objectivity, and the confrontation between the male and female gaze. Unapologetically unsettling, Prince’s Untitled masterfully probes the viewer through questions of authorship and aura, the original and the reproduction, and America’s dark obsession with sex and exploitation.
Without clear depth of field or scale, these human-like forms are less representations of the female beauty and more compilations of Prince’s talent as a mixed media collagist. Prince defines his black and white nudes by their modifications, combining classic print soft pornographic imagery with his child-like, gestural line. With each obscuring mark of his hand, Prince further distances his work from that of the original photographs. In this sense, he further objectifies the original subjects by using the figures as a vehicle to display his signature artistic mastery of appropriation. This process is intensified by Prince’s mixed-media approach utilizing both inkjet printing technologies and the human hand. The result is the motley crew of multi-limbed, anthropomorphic females reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Henri Matisse’s Dance, and the work’s referent, de Kooning’s Woman series. These mutants stand as a consummation of Prince’s infamousness, motifs of sensuality and sexuality, subjectivity and objectivity, and the confrontation between the male and female gaze. Unapologetically unsettling, Prince’s Untitled masterfully probes the viewer through questions of authorship and aura, the original and the reproduction, and America’s dark obsession with sex and exploitation.