Richard Prince

Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of minor wear and handling along the edges of the canvas, most notably at the corners. Under ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed
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An absolutely archetypal example of Richard Prince’s celebrated corpus, Untitled (Abu Simbel After Dark) encapsulates the artist’s distinctive conceptual and aesthetic practice. Reminiscent of the artist’s iconic Nurse Paintings the singular female protagonist is replaced by an exotic and altogether mysterious abstracted nude form mined from the eponymous After Dark novels. Prince turned to his own extensive collection of paperback drug store novels, and culled his source images from their exotically titled locales and graphically alluring covers, becoming infatuated with the global reach of the After Dark Series:   

“It started when I met with Marc Jacobs a couple of years ago...I also just remembered I had all these After Dark books in my library and what I liked about them was, aside from the suggestion of what that actually means, the books had been written in all these different cities that I would find. I tried to hunt them down and every country seemed to have an After Dark book. I liked the little text that went with it and I liked the font." (Richard Prince, interviewed by Natalie Shakur for Russh Magazine, 2010).

Each painting is rife with painterly expression and derives its own distinctive character from Prince’s calculated manipulation of his source. Striking in its chromatic intensity and provocative in its compositional form, Untitled (Abu Simbel After Dark) is a truly exceptional work from this seminal series.

Prince abandoned any notion of authorial anonymity and instead lavished the background of his canvas with the kind of unadulterated painterly release associated with his famed Abstract Expressionist forebears. Keeping the garish palette, yet radically altering the narrative of the book’s cover, Prince creates an entirely new and unique image in Untitled (Abu Simbel After Dark).

Provocation and the disruption of his viewer’s preconceived definitions of what constitutes art have been the most consistent leitmotifs of Richard Prince’s decidedly diverse corpus. From the time that he first re-photographed Marlboro cigarette ads for his Cowboy series in 1983, Prince has expressed his artistic impulse through cultural quotation. Archetypes are his protagonists, and his use of them forges an unrelenting bond between his work and the cultural zeitgeist of his given moment. Like a modern day flâneur, Prince identifies the most revealing aspects and impulses of our modern society and reproduces them to the full extent of their seductive splendor. Like an advertisement meant to instantaneously excite and attract its viewer, Untitled (Abu Simbel After Dark) begs for us to relish in its sumptuous surface.