Richard Prince

Sammlung Goetz, Munich
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Richard Prince Photographien 1980-1993, June - July 1994
Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst; Zurich, Kunsthalle; Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum, Richard Prince - Photographs, December 2001 - February 2002 (another example exhibited)
New York, Sotheby's S|2, Wanderlust, November 2012, cat. no. 16, pp. 42-43, illustrated in color

Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Regen Projects, Richard Prince: Women, 2004, no. 96, illustrated in color (installation view of Wolfsburg, Germany, 2001)

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are no apparent condition issues with this work. Framed under Plexiglas.
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For his Girlfriends series in the early 1990s, Richard Prince dissected the ephemeral world portrayed in biker magazines. Girlfriend (1993) is derived from the once popular imagery in American biker publications such as Easy-riders and Iron Horse. These magazines showcased photographs sent in from their readers of their own girlfriends—the biker chicks. The women themselves become objects of the men’s desires but also subjects of the men’s tastes. Through Prince’s selecting, rephotographing and cropping of the images, they are seen both in light of their original context and as well within our own subjectivity. 

The present work is a provocative depiction of a scantily clad woman posing on the back of a motorcycle. The image’s powerful message would certainly have been overlooked in its original context. In Prince’s work, the marginalized is upheld and in transcending the somewhat obscured oceanic background, the artist irreversibly alters the image’s relevance. By placing Girlfriend within the context of high art, Prince lends resonance and meaning to a once anonymous portrait. Consequently, in the Girlfriends series, every photographic fault, such as a grainy lack of focus or saturated light, becomes a vital element contributing to the work. Prince’s constructions artfully emphasize their bad color, bad lighting, hazy focus and stiff poses. Fundamentally the subjects, the "girlfriends," have advanced from their amateur posing as objectified possessions alongside the men’s motorbikes.

A true portraitist, Prince is revered as one of the most challenging, prolific contemporary artists of his generation. Just as Prince’s Cowboys series, produced a decade earlier, embodies an iconic representation of American masculinity, his Girlfriends series marks a reversal: whereas the Cowboys were costumed, choreographed and photographed by advertising professionals, the Girlfriends were set up by their boyfriends. 

Prince astutely dissects reality as his shrewd vision transforms the girlfriends, vitally repositioning images and instilling in them forceful identity. The artist powerfully revitalizes his subjects, giving prominence to the overlooked and raising new questions. Prince’s fragmented portraits of women scrutinize issues of gender, desire, ego, imagination and the manifestations of culture in analyzing the relationship between men and women.