Richard PRINCE (1949) X SUPREME - Lot 39

Richard PRINCE (1949) X SUPREME Hippie. Screen-printed skateboard. 79 x 20 cm. Double signature, one by hand. Note: American photographer and painter Richard Prince has been one of the most celebrated figures on the international art scene since his work emerged in the 1970s. His work has been exhibited in the most prestigious international institutions, including the Whitney Museum in New York (1992), the Kunsthalle in Zurich (2001), the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2007), the Kunsthaus in Bregenz (2014) and, more recently, the Fondation Louis Vuitton (2018). From October 2019 to January 2020, Richard Prince presents the exhibition Portraits at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. After a childhood spent near Boston, Richard Prince arrived in New York in the early 1970s and found a job in the archives department of Time Life, where he was responsible for classifying press cuttings by subject or author. His work cutting up newspapers and magazines led him to take an interest in the scraps of advertising, advertisements and comic strips, which he began to collect. It was at this point that he became involved with a group of artists - including Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and John Baldessari - based in the city. Their practice of appropriating and hijacking advertising and cultural images from this new consumer society mirrored his own. At an exhibition entitled Pictures in 1977, the American critic and curator Douglas Crimp theorised and described this movement as the Pictures Generation. Richard Prince's profoundly postmodern practice consists of recycling popular culture (as well as certain more marginal cultures) and a fine and often humorous deconstruction of American imagery. To do this, Prince uses advertising images that he re-photographs, reframes, enlarges and/or reorganises into collages. As photographic ready-mades that play with the notion of authorship and copyright, his works tend to reveal and mock certain stereotypes that have shaped American mythology and irrigated the collective imagination. In the early 1980s, he made a name for himself with his famous Cowboys series, taken from Marlboro advertising campaigns (1980-1984), idealising male virility, and later with Gangs, focusing on the subculture of bikers and their lightly dressed girlfriends. From 1986 onwards, he began to paint his Joke Paintings, reproducing on canvas the gossipy jokes typical of popular culture. In 2002, he began the famous Nurses series, dedicated to the eroticised and disturbing nurses who populate American pulp literature. A veritable cult object in the United States, the customised cars of the 1960s, whose bonnets he reproduces and then repaints, also inspire his works entitled Car Hoods, which oscillate between paintings and sculptures.