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A cowboy walks into a bar and says to the bartender, “Who’s the asshole who owns this shithole?”
—Richard Prince
Gagosian is pleased to present Richard Prince’s Cowboy paintings.
Over the last thirty years, the American cowboy has given rise to some of Prince’s most celebrated works. Dividing into several phases between the early 1980s and the present, his rephotographing of verité images inspired by cowboy Westerns and produced for the advertising industry, reveals as much about his shifting relationship to an American icon and its construction by the mass media as his use of evolving reprographic technologies.
In the earliest iterations, out of necessity Prince shot around advertising copy to obtain the final edit, resulting in tightly cropped, grainy close-ups of larger-than-life ranchers, printed in standard format. In the second stage, enhanced production techniques allowed him to substantially increase the scale and intensity of the final images, and move his subjects out into the landscape. In the third phase he was able to work from high quality images totally devoid of copy. Thus the cowboys were reduced to diminutive yet legible ciphers dwarfed by vast, bucolic American landscapes. Transposed into the world of art, these cinematic vistas evoked—not without a trace of irony—the great Romantic tradition in painting.
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Picture Books: Percival Everett and Brandon Taylor
The second installment of Picture Books, an imprint organized by Emma Cline and Gagosian, presents author Percival Everett’s novella Grand Canyon, Inc. alongside Untitled (Original Cowboy), a photograph by Richard Prince. In celebration of the publication, Everett met with author Brandon Taylor to discuss the novella, the role of history in the writing process, and the similarity in methodologies for science and literature.
Richard Prince: Cowboy
On the occasion of the publication of Richard Prince: Cowboy, a major monograph on the artist’s preoccupation with the mythic American West, Lucy Sante tracks the archetype through mass media, advertising, and the art of Richard Prince to illuminate the cowboy’s enduring appeal.
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