Richard Prince American, b. 1949
"Prince doesn't just appropriate images — he re-photographs desire itself, holding up a mirror to the collective fantasies of American culture until they become strange, unsettling, and true."
Richard Prince (born 1949) is an American artist whose pioneering use of appropriation — re-photographing images from advertising, pulp fiction, and popular culture — placed him at the centre of postmodern debates about authorship, originality, and the image. His Cowboys and Nurses series, his Joke paintings, and his Canal Zone works are landmarks of late 20th and early 21st century art. He is represented by Gagosian Gallery and his work is held at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and major collections worldwide.
"I have always been interested in fantasy rather than reality, in desire rather than fact."
Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Canal Zone of Panama. He moved to New York in the early 1970s, where he worked in the tear-sheet room of Time-Life, cutting images from magazines — an experience that would prove foundational for his art. In the late 1970s, he began re-photographing advertisements from fashion and lifestyle magazines, isolating the images from their text and reframing them as art objects.
His first major series, the Cowboys (begun 1980), appropriated Marlboro cigarette advertisements featuring rugged Western riders — images that had become America's most potent mythology of masculinity and freedom. By photographing these already-reproduced images and enlarging them as gallery prints, Prince questioned what originality could mean in an age of mass reproduction, and what desires were being sold alongside cigarettes.
His Joke paintings (1987 onwards) transcribed dirty jokes in hand-painted text on monochrome fields, while the Nurses series (2003–2004) reprinted pulp romance novel covers — both engaging with American vernacular culture's anxieties, fantasies, and repressions.
In 2014, Prince began his New Portraits series: screenshots of Instagram posts by strangers, printed large and exhibited — a legal and cultural provocation that reignited debates about authorship and digital culture that have never been resolved. He lives and works in New York and upstate New York.
Major exhibitions: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992, retrospective); Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Serpentine Gallery, London; MoMA, New York.
Works in public collections: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Selected bibliography: Jeff Rian, Richard Prince, Phaidon, 2003; Barbara Kruger & Phil Mariani, Remaking History, Bay Press, 1989; Rosetta Brooks, Richard Prince, Artforum, 1987.