RICHARD PRINCE
2013-01-28Fourteen expansive canvases hybridise the forms of various recent series. Each canvas features an over-painted ink-jet print of a single female figure or giantess, a hybrid of Prince’s Rasta paintings, De Kooning paintings, and a separate series of works inspired by Picasso. The women teeter between the appearance of neoclassical marbles and fragments of soft porn. Through Prince’s interventions in acrylic, the torsos metamorphose into gigantic sculptural bodies, with wrestling mask heads and elongated, angular limbs painted in grisaille tones.
In line with much of Prince’s art, these paintings grapple with the idea of influence, reusing and deconstructing his own and other artists’ iconography in order to challenge the avant-garde gospel of ‘originality’. In the late 2000s, Prince began a cycle of paintings which similarly corrupted Willem de Kooning’s ‘Women’ series – conflating the originals with pornographic ink-jet prints and sections of expressive, ‘painterly’ brushwork. In this latest series, the figures’ masked faces, box-like appendages and clubbed extremities often jar absurdly with their agile poses. In defiance of painting’s fervent movement away from photographic styles of representation throughout the twentieth century, Prince cheekily injects photography back into the picture. These works profess their sources – their debt to Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, at the same time as they express a close sympathy with (and perhaps a nostalgia for) the grand painterly statements of Modernism.
Exhibition runs through to March 23rd, 2013
Sadie Coles
4 New Burlington Place
London
W1S 2HS
