Richard Prince

mural-sized Ektacolor print, signed, dated, and numbered '2/2' by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, framed, a Gladstone Gallery, New York, label on the reverse, 1993, no. 2 in an edition of 2 and one artist's proof

This image is included in the composite work, Live Free or Die: 

Spiritual America (IVAM, The Valencian Institute of Modern Art, 1989, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 42

Carl Haenlein, ed., Richard Prince, Photographien 1977-1993 (Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, 1994, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 23

Richard Prince: Adult Comedy Action Drama (Berlin, 1995), p. 205

Richard Prince (New York, 2003), p. 63

Richard Prince Photographs (Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2002, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 159

Philip Monk, The American Trip: Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Cady Noland, Richard Prince (Toronto, Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre, 1996, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 40

This print has not been examined out of the frame. It appears to be in generally excellent condition.
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The photograph offered here comes from one of Richard Prince's most important bodies of work, the Girlfriend series, and shows this iconoclastic artist's fascination with the imagery of popular culture.  The image was one of nine from the Girlfriend series brought together in an earlier composite photograph entitled Live Free or Die (1986).  Prince shortly thereafter produced the present mural-sized version of this image in an extremely limited edition of two.

Prince started the Girlfriend series in 1990 by re-photographing the amateur snapshots published in biker magazines such as Easyriders and Iron Horse.  Like his earlier series that focused on advertising photographs, the mythic American cowboy, or cartoons from the New Yorker and Playboy, the Girlfriend series likewise culled its imagery from American culture as rendered by the print media.  In the Girlfriend series, however, Prince concentrated on the subculture of bikers, specifically its representation of women.  Bikers and bike culture had previously proved a fertile subject for filmmakers, photographers, and writers as diverse as Kenneth Anger, Robert Frank, Danny Lyon, and Hunter S. Thompson, and films such as The Wild One (1953) and Easy Rider (1969) had brought this world and its associated stereotypes into the public eye.  But Prince's approach to this subject matter was wholly new, and his brazenly re-photographed and enlarged images of bikers' girlfriends offer a provocative commentary on this little-known segment of American culture.  Raw and imposing, these large-scale works have an undeniable impact.   

In the early 1970s, Prince's job in the tear sheet department at Time Inc., allowed him to immerse himself in magazine imagery.  There he collected the cut-out advertisements which would provide source material for his work of the late 1970s.  Raising issues of authorship and authenticity, Prince was at the forefront of a generation of artists, including Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine, who took mass media, popular culture, and the work of other artists as their subjects.  Prince's use of photography broke radically with the ways the medium had traditionally been utilized, understood, and disseminated.  In a 2003 interview, he summarized his thinking:  'I started to think of a photograph as an object and not a repetitive multiple. I mean, for me the frame around the photographs was important: how it was presented and hung on the wall. The edition was important. I started making editions of two. Not quite unique but almost' (Richard Prince, Phaidon Press, pp. 10-11).