Richard Prince
Richard Prince (b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone) is one of the central figures of the Pictures Generation, the cohort of American artists who from the late 1970s turned the camera on advertising, mass media, and the codes of vernacular American culture. Working primarily through rephotography, he copies images already in circulation and re-presents them, often unaltered, as art, interrogating authorship, originality, and the commercial production of desire across photography, painting, sculpture, and the book form.
His most recognised series include the Cowboys (begun 1980), which isolate the lone Marlboro figure from cigarette advertisements; the Girlfriends and Fashion pictures of the 1980s; the Joke paintings (begun 1986), which set borrowed one-liners against monochrome grounds; the Nurse paintings (2002–), based on the covers of mid-century pulp romance novels; and the New Portraits (2014), screen-captured Instagram posts shown as inkjet prints. In 2005, Prince's Untitled (Cowboy) became the first single photograph to sell for more than $1 million at auction. He has been the subject of major surveys at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Spiritual America, 2007), the Serpentine Galleries, and the Albertina Museum, Vienna (2026); his work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Stedelijk Museum, among others.
This collection brings together exhibition catalogues, artist books, small editions, and ephemera by and about Prince, from the earliest 1980s appropriation works through the present.
