Richard Prince: New Portraits

Prince has pioneered appropriation since the mid-1970s, mining images from mass media, advertising, and entertainment to subvert and redefine concepts of authorship and ownership.The New Portraits series updates this strategy and continues Prince's exploration of photography through the platform of Instagram. Drawn to certain users, Prince traverses an illimitable network of links, jumping from one account to another, scanning through postings, reading endless texts, discarding, collecting, commenting, and cementing. He captures images that appear to be products of the medium itself; these portraits belong to an infinite stream of image distribution, catalyzing exhibitionism and voyeurism. The artist's comments - non sequiturs, jokes, quotes, oxymorons, and emojis - embolden his authorship in this enlivened new direction in portraiture. In a fusion of painting and photography, image and text, and authorship and freedom, intervention becomes composition and the written word becomes brushstroke, handled with a signature. The only catalogue to document this particular body of work thus far, the unique artists' book features Prince's recent topical text "Bird Talk," and is housed in a hinged, screw-bound acrylic cover, accompanied by a bubble-wrap slipcase. 1st edition of 1000 Screw Bound Acrylic Hardcover; 64 pages