Richard Prince

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New York
Skarstedt Fine Art, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2005

New York, Skarstedt Fine Art, Richard Prince: Early Photographs 1977-1979, 2001, pp.4-5, illustration of another example in colour
Basel, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Richard Prince, Photographs, 2001-2, pp. 11-13, mo. 12, illustration of another example in colour
New York, Guggenheim Museum; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center; London, Serpentine Gallery, Richard Prince, Spiritual America, 2007-8, pp. 62-63, illustration of another example in colour
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Richard Prince: American Prayer, 2011, pp. 106, illustration of another example in colour

Rosetta Brooks and Jeff Rian, Richard Prince, London 2003, pp. 100-1, illustration of another example in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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The Untitled (Pens) series is among Richard Prince’s earliest appropriated photographic works, and springs directly from his period of employment at Time Inc., where he worked alone in the basement of the Tearsheets Department. Page-by-page, he separated advertisements from editorial content in various published magazines so that articles were available to staff in-house without the extraneous commercial content. He rapidly became fascinated with these leftover images, first collecting them and using them to create collages. The crucial moment came in 1977 when he began to photograph, crop, and enlarge the glossy illustrations without their associated slogans or texts. After beginning with living rooms, he moved on to luxury objects such as the present work: whiskey labels, watches, and pens. Models, couples, and the iconic cowboys were soon to follow.

The present images of special or limited edition objects – masculine, corporate, and traditionally affordable to a wealthy few – were used by Prince to make subsequent limited editions of photography that, when framed and hung, give the original objects a new importance. Elucidating the transformational effect of appropriation, the artist has said: “[a] resemblance more than a reproduction, a rephotograph is essentially an appropriation of what’s already real about an existing image and an attempt to add on or additionalize this reality onto something more real, a virtuoso real, a reality that has the chances of looking real, but a reality that doesn’t have any chances of being real” (Practicing Without a License,http://www.richardprince.com/writings/practicing-without-a-license-1977).