Lot 18
RICHARD PRINCE(B. 1949)Untitled (Refreshment), 1982
15 February 2020, 12:00 PST
Los AngelesSold for US$47,575 inc. premium
Looking for a similar item?
Our Post-War and Contemporary Art specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialistAsk about this lot
RICHARD PRINCE (B. 1949)
Untitled (Refreshment), 1982
signed, numbered and dated 'R Prince 1982 2/2' (lower right); signed and dated 'R Prince 1982' (on the reverse)
Ektacolor photograph
20 x 24 in.
50.8 x 61 cm.
This work is number two from the edition of two.
signed, numbered and dated 'R Prince 1982 2/2' (lower right); signed and dated 'R Prince 1982' (on the reverse)
Ektacolor photograph
20 x 24 in.
50.8 x 61 cm.
This work is number two from the edition of two.
Footnotes
This lot is offered without a reserve.
Provenance
Nahmad Contemporary, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Literature
N. Spector, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2007, p. 269, another example illustrated
Richard Prince: Fashion 1982-84, exh. cat., New York, Nahmad Contemporary, 2015, n.p., illustrated
Untitled (Refreshment) dates from a rich period of Richard Prince's career exemplified by works that comment on the culture of materialism, mass marketing and advertising that overwhelmed Americans in the 1970s and 1980s. Associated with a group called the "Pictures Generation" Prince, along with Jack Goldstein, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine and Barbara Kruger, took the art world by storm by redefining appropriation as an art form.
Prince's artistic practice of appropriation began while he was working for Time Life magazine. Prince was responsible for clipping and filing articles for the magazine's editor, which left the artist with hundreds of intriguing image-based advertisements. Prince experimented with creating collages with the images he sourced, and later abandoned that practice in favor of simply photographing them, often with slight alterations. The act of appropriation redefined contemporary art practices as Prince moved past the traditional Duchampian method where the artist added a new and altered value to a found object. Prince's appropriation is not intended as a claim to authorship, rather it is an act of simulation and of social commentary.
Prince's choice of subjects to rephotograph initially had to do with the believability of the image. "If there's any one thing going on through these images, it's that I as an audience don't believe them." (R. Prince, quoted in M. Heiferman, "Richard Prince", in Bomb Magazine, Issue 24, Summer 1988). Through a delicate process of removing the original marketing symbols, such as company logos and captions, Prince frees the image from these encumbrances and removes it from the original context. Prince elaborates on his process, stating, "Rephotographing is a technique for stealing (pirating) already existing images, simulating, rather than copying them, 'managing' rather than quoting them—re-producing their effect and look as naturally as they had been produced when they first appeared. A resemblance more than a reproduction, a rephotograph is essentially an appropriation of what's already real about an existing image and an attempt to add on or additionalize this reality onto something more real, a virtuoso real—a reality that has the chances of looking real, but a reality that doesn't have any chances of being real." (R. Prince, quoted by N. Spector, "Nowhere Man", in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2007, p. 29.)
