Richard Prince

Sometimes when I walk into a gallery and I see someone’s work, I think to myself, ‘Gee, I wish I had done that.’
—Richard Prince

Gagosian is pleased to announce Bob Dylan, an exhibition by Richard Prince featuring a trio of large-scale paintings of the singer-songwriter, opening at the gallery in Beverly Hills on February 27. With Dylan’s popularity and influence again in ascendence following the theatrical release of James Mangold’s Oscar-nominated biopic A Complete Unknown (2024), Prince’s work casts a spotlight of a different kind on the Nobel Prize–winning musician by reflecting on the extraordinary resonance of his image.

The three striking ten-foot-square paintings on view in Beverly Hills, which together make up Untitled (Dylan) (2014), show a detail of Jerry Schatzberg’s famous portrait shot of Dylan, which was reproduced on John Berg’s cover design for the 1966 double LP Blonde on Blonde. Dylan’s seventh studio album, the record combines an expansive musicality with a modernist lyrical style and is often ranked as among the greatest ever made. The cover image, which portrays its subject in a dark suede jacket and black-and-white checkered scarf looking directly at the photographer, was taken outside 375 West Street at Morton Street in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. In his interpretation, Prince presents the likeness, which was originally in naturalistic color, in gauzy black-and-white. He also manipulates its already shaky focus to varying degrees, further obscuring its fine detail.