Richard Prince
b. 1949, American
A painter and photographer based in New York, Richard Prince is a problematic artist who has changed the paradigm of contemporary art since the 1970s. Since 1977, he has been working in a way of making changes by re-photographing existing photos or advertisement photos in newspapers and magazines. He is the creator of the term “Re-photography,” and his works have always been a hot topic in the art world by reinterpreting concepts such as copyright, ownership, and uniqueness.
Prince has huge collections such as first editions of various books, magazine photos from the 60s and 70s, old advertisements, images of celebrities, as well as sexual jokes and cartoons. And most of his collections become the source of his work. When it is called “borrowing” to take and reinterpret an existing thing, his work makes the borrowing of borrowing and shows the culture of this era, where new meaning is created by the constant repetition of images.
He reinterpreted even the masters of art history beyond the existing images and texts. He reinterpreted Willem de Kooning at the Gagosian exhibition in Paris in 2011, followed by Jackson Pollock at the Guild Hall in New York, and especially the large-scale series of paintings, drawings, and collages which reinterpreted Picasso at the Picasso Malaga Museum in Spain in 2012.
Prince had solo exhibitions in leading art museums around the world, such as the Whitney Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MoMA, the Tate Modern, Center Georges Pompidou, and Kunsthalle in Germany. He participated in large-scale international art events such as the Sao Paulo Biennale and Whitney Biennale. Major collections belong to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in the UK.
