Edited by Fabienne Stephan. Text by Jeanne Greenberg.
Richard Prince (born 1949) has a connoisseur's eye for American iconography, and an artist's knack for transforming that iconography into art forms: car hoods, signed photographs, adverts--and T-shirts. Casually stretched over frames to poke fun at the grandeur of the tautly stretched canvas, and messily painted or silkscreened, the T-shirts are more intimate in scale than much of Prince's recent work. They also offer a kind of mini-survey of his career, ranging in subject from jokes to abstractions to images of hippies or rock icons like Jimi Hendrix (one imagines the artist packing the T-shirts in a valise like Duchamp as a miniaturized retrospective). One series, done for the artist's daughter, tread less familiar terrain, with images of animal and flower drawings. Presented together in this volume for the first time, they affirm Prince's ongoing appropriation of the American vernacular.
"His doodle of a boy with smiley face, branded as the 'Hippie Punk,' jumps from one painting to the next. The aphorism 'Hippie Punk' combines his own contradictory verbiage. The artist gives way to dual generations and ideologies--from paintings covered in flower power, to raw canvases aggressively pulled, splattered and Punk."
Jeanne Greenberg, excerpted from Richard Prince: Hippie Punk in Richard Prince: T-Shirt Paintings. Featured image is reproduced from Richard Prince: T-Shirt Paintings.
"Richard Prince's work cannibalizes all forms of sexual desire. His Marlboro man is both strapping cowboy and homoerotic; his de Kooning women sit in some trans-gendered, orgiastic state; his Girlfriends are mistresses in muscle cars; and his nurses range from savage to schoolgirl. Even so, his T-Shirt paintings are made from the vantage point of a straight man. Rooted in a more private practice, these works reveal Prince as working artist, rock 'n' roll fan, collector, good father, and fantasy lover…Richard's T-Shirt paintings transmit this unpredictable male aura. The paintings are casually assembled--as if hastily stripped from his torso and stapled onto the stretched. Some are printed with jokes, others with an RP trademark, and most are paint stained, seemingly slept in. We are in bed with Richard Prince--Rauschenberg's Bed refashioned."
FORMAT: Pbk, 7.75 x 11 in. / 72 pgs / 63 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $24.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $27.5 ISBN: 9783037642139 PUBLISHER: JRP|Ringier AVAILABLE: 7/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: SDNR30 PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD Excl FR DE AU CH
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Fabienne Stephan. Text by Jeanne Greenberg.
Richard Prince (born 1949) has a connoisseur's eye for American iconography, and an artist's knack for transforming that iconography into art forms: car hoods, signed photographs, adverts--and T-shirts. Casually stretched over frames to poke fun at the grandeur of the tautly stretched canvas, and messily painted or silkscreened, the T-shirts are more intimate in scale than much of Prince's recent work. They also offer a kind of mini-survey of his career, ranging in subject from jokes to abstractions to images of hippies or rock icons like Jimi Hendrix (one imagines the artist packing the T-shirts in a valise like Duchamp as a miniaturized retrospective). One series, done for the artist's daughter, tread less familiar terrain, with images of animal and flower drawings. Presented together in this volume for the first time, they affirm Prince's ongoing appropriation of the American vernacular.
