Richard Prince

Gladstone Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2006

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of wear and handling to the sides and edges of the canvas. There is evidence of minor lifting to the edges of some of the collaged elements. Under ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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The Nudist, painted in 2006, epitomizes Richard Prince's wry brand of appropriation. In 1985, Prince began what would become an extended lauded artistic practice, known as the Joke Paintings. By painting punch lines on canvas, sometimes going so far as to remove the accompanying cartoon, Prince deftly repositions humor, importing it to the realm of fine art. His text, stenciled immensely in a sans serif font, is too large to absorb all at once, and though the words remain intact, what was meant originally to be read with an attention to narrative becomes purely graphic. Prince presents the joke as an endless loop, which exaggerates the textuality of his previous works, perhaps even mocking earlier paintings with self-referentiality.

Fashion, women, sex, cars, film and any other blue-collar, consumer driven imagery is all inspiration for Prince’s subject matter. In 1974 Prince was working the nightshift for Time-Life magazines and clipping editorials to assist the staff-writer’s research. While dismantling text from thousands of advertisements, the artist noticed the endless patterns inherent in the detritus of American media. In The Nudist, Prince extends his visual appropriation to pin-up girls, centerfolds and pornographic imagery along with his iconic banking checks. The resulting gridded photo collage borrows from found imagery as well as the aesthetic of Jasper Johns’s Alphabets, Numbers, and Maps series. Prince transposes the graphic imagery into an assorted array of limbs, flesh and vibrant flashes of color.  At first glance the present work appears as a transcendent abstraction, while a close inspection reveals the collaged chaos and shocking subject matter coyly arranged across the surface.

Prince deals in simulacra – representations of representations, imitations of things that don't exist. Like the work of Warhol, Prince compels his viewers to consider the mechanics behind an increasingly image-dominated culture: our relationship to specific typologies, stereotypes, idealized notions of the everyday and our relationship to pictures themselves. Prince tests our definitions of art, commerce, and culture. Here, with a Duchampian impulse towards relocating the familiar, Prince de-contextualizes the joke – dated in its casual colonialism – and blows it up to a scale that makes the words all but illegible. There is a tension here between reading and seeing; it's almost impossible to decipher the joke itself; the text instead becomes a sort of glyph, something strange and pictorial. Prince creates new environments for text, unexpected two-dimensional habitats in which words are translated into images. "The joke paintings," Prince explained "are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can't speak English" (Steve Lafreniere, "Richard Prince talks to Steve Lafreniere – '80 Then – Interview", Art Forum, March 2003).