STAGES

Richard Prince

“Appropriation” is the term most often associated with the brilliantly iconoclastic and often controversial American artist Richard Prince (b. 1949).

By repurposing existing media content — most notably photographs from magazine advertisements or texts and imagery from books — Prince has developed a method of recontextualizing vernacular images observed by millions in a way that frees them of their typically inane origins and allows them to spark new visual dialogues in the process.

I’m Not Coming Home

richardprince Collage and acrylic on canvas, 117cm x 86cm.
© Richard Prince, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Well-known examples include his “Cowboy” series, derived from cigarette ads, his “Jokes” series, incorporating lines (oftentimes purposefully bad ones) copied from joke books, and his iconic “Nurses” series, which employs imagery of nurses taken from the covers of men’s midcentury pulp novels.

For STAGES, Prince has combined a “Joke” painting with “Nurse” imagery, an exceedingly rare feat. He has done so to both reference cancer — the joke part being a riff on the 1902 song “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” — and to pay personal tribute to Lance Armstrong — since the cyclist was cared for deeply and constantly by the nurses of Indiana University.

Prince lives and works from his house in upstate New York and is represented by Gagosian Gallery.