FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Stuart Regen Gallery
619 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (213) 276-5424
Fax. (213) 276-7430
RICHARD PRINCE EXHIBITION
February 15th - March 15th, 1991
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10:00-6:00
The Stuart Regen Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by New York artist Richard Prince. The show will consist of eight drawings in the main gallery and one large painting, I Know This Guy, in the auxiliary gallery.
Born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone and living in New York since the early 70s, Prince is the seminal figure for Appropriation art which emerged in the late 70s and early 80s. The first to explore “rephotography” in 1977, Prince began creating his “fictions” through the pirating of advertising images culled from magazines. Often misread solely as a critique of modern consumer life, Prince’s work was more about creating a “look” that was capable of exposing the interstices of the American libido as well as an overriding view into that culture. Rather than being overtly political Prince’s work focused on the perversion and pleasure inherent in the subconscious ramifications of his images, that which was evident in the margins of the generic, popular image as relayed by the artist/editor.
As Prince’s oeuvre has developed throughout his various series--“Entertainers,” “Gangs,” “Jokes,” “Hoods,” and so on--his “look,” or “fiction,” has moved to locate an elegant perversion in sources of low, popular, or underground culture, all of them utilizing the magazine as Prince’s primary art supply store. What has become particularly notable in the recent work is how Prince’s fiction, his oeuvre as a whole, has become increasingly accessible as an informed, exquisitely eclectic barometer of everything around us. The “Jokes,” for example, are as much about the humor and sources they convey as they are about the pathos and oftentimes sexual politics that emerge between the lines.
In this current exhibition Prince relies on an amalgam of his previous styles. The drawings and painting on view look more like “art” than in previous works. They consist of hand-rendered and silk-screened images, jokes, and writing presented in a hazy, white wash. The “scenes” depicted in the images as well as implied in the writing straddle a certain territory between Prince’s desire to make “hit” pictures and a personal terrorism. Because the “fiction/style/look” here is at last so clear and functions on so many levels--including Prince revealing his own romance with being an artist--the new works are conceivably his most successful to date. The drawings, in particular, take on the effect of rare, unexpurgated manuscripts by an artist who is, possibly, the best of his time.
Richard Prince has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the United States. His retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art opens this November and will travel to, among other museums, San Francisco MoMA and the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam.
For further information please contact Stuart Regen or Shaun Caley at the gallery. An opening reception for the artist will take place on Friday, February 15th from 6:00 - 8:00 pm at the gallery.
Stuart Regen Gallery
619 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (213) 276-5424
Fax. (213) 276-7430
RICHARD PRINCE EXHIBITION
February 15th - March 15th, 1991
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10:00-6:00
The Stuart Regen Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by New York artist Richard Prince. The show will consist of eight drawings in the main gallery and one large painting, I Know This Guy, in the auxiliary gallery.
Born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone and living in New York since the early 70s, Prince is the seminal figure for Appropriation art which emerged in the late 70s and early 80s. The first to explore “rephotography” in 1977, Prince began creating his “fictions” through the pirating of advertising images culled from magazines. Often misread solely as a critique of modern consumer life, Prince’s work was more about creating a “look” that was capable of exposing the interstices of the American libido as well as an overriding view into that culture. Rather than being overtly political Prince’s work focused on the perversion and pleasure inherent in the subconscious ramifications of his images, that which was evident in the margins of the generic, popular image as relayed by the artist/editor.
As Prince’s oeuvre has developed throughout his various series--“Entertainers,” “Gangs,” “Jokes,” “Hoods,” and so on--his “look,” or “fiction,” has moved to locate an elegant perversion in sources of low, popular, or underground culture, all of them utilizing the magazine as Prince’s primary art supply store. What has become particularly notable in the recent work is how Prince’s fiction, his oeuvre as a whole, has become increasingly accessible as an informed, exquisitely eclectic barometer of everything around us. The “Jokes,” for example, are as much about the humor and sources they convey as they are about the pathos and oftentimes sexual politics that emerge between the lines.
In this current exhibition Prince relies on an amalgam of his previous styles. The drawings and painting on view look more like “art” than in previous works. They consist of hand-rendered and silk-screened images, jokes, and writing presented in a hazy, white wash. The “scenes” depicted in the images as well as implied in the writing straddle a certain territory between Prince’s desire to make “hit” pictures and a personal terrorism. Because the “fiction/style/look” here is at last so clear and functions on so many levels--including Prince revealing his own romance with being an artist--the new works are conceivably his most successful to date. The drawings, in particular, take on the effect of rare, unexpurgated manuscripts by an artist who is, possibly, the best of his time.
Richard Prince has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the United States. His retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art opens this November and will travel to, among other museums, San Francisco MoMA and the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam.
For further information please contact Stuart Regen or Shaun Caley at the gallery. An opening reception for the artist will take place on Friday, February 15th from 6:00 - 8:00 pm at the gallery.