Richard Prince

I wanted to paint something that was already painted.
—Richard Prince

Gagosian is pleased to announce Richard Prince: Hoods, the first exhibition dedicated to this body of work. Hoods will feature more than thirty works made over the span of twenty-five years, from 1988 through 2013, and all personally selected by Prince for this exhibition. The presentation will showcase loans from major institutions and private collections, including the Brant Foundation, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut; the Broad, Los Angeles; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Pinault Collection, Paris; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; as well as from the collection of the artist.

To make Hoods, Prince acquired hoods from 1960s and ’70s muscle cars, at first ordering them primarily from advertisements in automotive magazines—a continuation of the strategic appropriation, collecting, and détournement of mass-media sources that are central to his practice. Initially, Prince hired body shops to prep and paint the hoods; later, he began applying the automotive body filler Bondo, sanding, and painting them himself by hand. Surfaces and palettes vary considerably across the series, with the matte tones of Bondo and saturated hues of paint used as compositional elements. The resulting Hoods relate to two postwar American trends: DIY car culture and avant-garde art in their exploration of abstraction and the readymade. The works’ wall mounting emphasizes the distinctive bulges, scoops, and other design features that made the era’s cars iconic. Also on display are works from the related series Pedestal Hoods (2004–07), which returns the hoods to a horizontal plane as wholly sculptural forms. Both series were exhibited in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, a major survey organized in 2007 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Following that retrospective, Prince returned to the series, incorporating new approaches and materials in a workshop he calls the Body Shop on his studio complex in Rensselaerville, New York.

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