Richard Prince. [signed] [first edition]

Richard Prince emerged in the 1980s as one of America's new, highly innovative artists who worked with the margins of American subcultures and visual debris. Highly idiosyncratic subject matter - such as one-line jokes, cartoons, cowboys ("borrowed" from the Marlboro ads) and motorcycle gangs - are central to his work. In the late 1970s Prince was working for the cutting services of "Time Life" publications in New York, and had access to thousands of cut-up magazines of which only the advertisements remained intact. He began to re-photograph the advertisements and compose his own pictures from this highly familiar, "Pop" imagery - updating Pop Art's homage to consumerism and its icons in the 1960s. Recently Prince's work has taken an unexpected turn, and the artist has emerged as a consummate painter, producing some of the most unusual and admired works in the current painting scene. Prince is one of America's best-known artists internationally, and in 1992 was honoured with a one-person retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other museums which have held solo shows of Prince's work include the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kunsthalle Dusseldorf; IVAM, Valencia; and the Haus der Kunst, Munich, among many others.