Richard Prince

Mining images from mass media, advertising and entertainment, Prince has continuously redefined authorship and ownership as they relate to contemporary art. As an employee at Time-Life Inc. during the 1970s and early 1980s, he was captivated by the contrived glamour of magazine ads for jewelry, furniture, and fashion. He began to re-photograph these images of what he described as “social science fiction,” cropping them, removing text, and grouping them by subject. Such appropriative processes have remained at the heart of his all-consuming work. In deadpan paintings, photographs, and sculptures, Prince has probed the depths of racism, sexism, and psychosis in mainstream humor; the mythical status of cowboys, bikers, customized cars, and celebrities; and the push-pull allure of pulp fiction, soft porn and, most recently, social media.

Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone, and lives and works in New York. Public collections include Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Tate Britain, London; Kunstmuseum Basel; and François Pinault Foundation, Venice. Selected solo museum exhibitions include Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1993); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1993); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001–02, traveled to Kunsthalle Zurich; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg); “Richard Prince: Spiritual America,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2007, traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, through 2008); “Richard Prince: Continuation,” Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); “Richard Prince: American Prayer,” an exhibition of American literature and ephemera from the artist's collection, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2011); and “Richard Prince: It’s a Free Concert,” Kunsthaus Bregenz (2014).