Richard Prince Everyday

Richard Prince: Everyday documents Prince's seventh solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, London, shown at the gallery's 62 Kingly Street space from 29 March to 5 May 2023.

The show extended Prince's Joke Paintings series using an index of jokes by the stand-up comedian Rodney Dangerfield, made between 2019 and 2021. One line — "Just my luck I was at the airport when my ship came in" — recurs across several canvases, retraced verbatim in oil stick lettering over Dangerfield's own scrawled stage notes. Other works layer in motifs from Prince's Hippie Drawings, Protest Paintings, Cheque Paintings, and High Times.

First conceived in the early 1980s, Prince's Joke Paintings draw on jokes lifted from magazines, books, and comedy routines, redrawn in styles ranging from spare monochrome text to layered collage. The series is a running exercise in his use of appropriation: a joke belongs to whoever retells it, and its origin is beside the point. Everyday ran concurrently with Prince's survey exhibition Same Man at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, his first solo presentation in Scandinavia.