Richard Prince: White Paintings

Celebrated for his appropriation of advertising images and photographs during the early 1970s, Richard Prince (born 1949) began in the 1980s to explore the relationship between image and language, pairing jokes from books and magazines with referential and non-referential imagery. In the 1990s, his Joke paintings transformed from rigidly composed works into freefloating combinations of jokes and stripped-down layered imagery. The White Paintings are raw and energetic in comparison to his earlier work. Here, handwritten and printed jokes mingle with gestural marks, silkscreened imagery and graphic fragments, all strewn across a white-pigmented backdrop. Prince’s hand is present in these works, with their painterly white texture, spirited whorls and handwritten elements. In this series, he uses appropriation in a new way, as he pays homage to great American abstract painters such as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg. This volume reproduces a selection from this series.