Richard Prince: Early Photography, 1977–87 Poster

This poster reproduces Untitled (Sunset) (1982), a photograph from Richard Prince's early appropriation work, made in 2023 for Richard Prince: Early Photography, 1977–87 at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London (October 5–December 22, 2023).

The exhibition surveyed the cowboy, girlfriend, and advertisement photographs Prince made by rephotographing images from magazines and advertising, a method he adopted in 1977 that recast questions of authorship and originality. Untitled (Sunset) shows a boy holding a clown puppet, rendered in low-resolution black and white against a red-orange ground that suggests the end of day.

Prince (b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone) built his early reputation on this rephotography method, extracting images from their original commercial context and re-presenting them as his own. The 1977–87 photographs remain the foundation for the appropriation strategies he later carried into painting and collage.