Beschreibung:

Richard Prince The Five Chairs 1993 Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas. 111 1/4 x 116 1/8 in. (282.6 x 295 cm).
Provenance Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York; Giraud Pissarro Segalot, New York/Paris Catalogue Essay "I found the subject matter, which was the jokes. Before that, I wanted to paint but I didn't know what to paint. The subject comes first, the medium second. … They're just paint, stretchers, and canvas; it's the subject that's radical." ('R. Prince interviwed by K. Rosenberg', New York Magazine, May 2, 2005) From the late 1970s, Prince began a practice of culling images and quotes from popular culture, painting textual jokes against found background images, mined from all aspects of American culture, from comic strips to advertisements. Alongside other artists like Cindy Sherman Jack Goldstein and Sherrie Levine Prince challenged ideas of originality and authorship by re-contextualizing pop cultural images. The Five Chairs relates to these quintessential Prince appropriations, but it is part of a later body of work in which Prince turned from photography to painting, taking inspiration from slightly different sources which bear traces of American painting of the 1950s. The chairs of the title are sketchy and smudged, each piece of furniture ringed by what could be a large thumbprint or coffee stain. The dirty graphic style of the work evokes Jackson Pollock Philip Guston or Cy Twombly figureheads of mid-century Abstract Expressionism. By juxtaposing the hurriedly drawn chairs alongside an apparently random and unrelated quote, Prince decontextualizes both components of the painting resulting in a work that is surprising and ironic. "There is no double meaning, no reading of the text's 'spirit.' The quote, the sentence, the joke are truly abstract, just as one sometimes refers to abstract paintings as 'concrete' painting: they represent nothing other than themselves. They are not a sign for something that is absent, like the word "journal" in cubist paintings. Here, the text is the real thing. The jokes, or quotes, are facts—not representations….These facts (images, words, all that is seen and heard) have no less reality than brute nature. His art is an art of the real, or rather of the 'almost real.' "( V. Pecoil, Richard Prince Canaries in the Coal Mine, Oslo, 2007, p. 130) In Five Chairs the joke is about a funeral, and mimics the all-too-well-known format of a "minister, rabbi, and priest" joke, but beyond this cultural touchstone of humor, the painting is not about the joke itself. Asked whether he comes up with his jokes himself, Prince responded with characteristic humor: "None of them are mine. I get them from magazines, books, the internet. Sometimes from the inside of a bank. You know they're just like blueprints that float around the sky and show up on a cloud. Sometimes I buy them from other criminals. People tell them to me. Ministers. Rabbis. Priests. Once I saw one in the washing machine spinning around getting clean." (Richard Prince in Modern Painters, Vol. 15, No. 3, Autumn 2002) Read More Artist Bio Richard Prince American • 1947 While some artists are known for a signature style, Richard Prince is most closely associated with his subject matter: for instance, Cowboys, his series of the Marlboro man magnified between 1980 and 1994; Nurses, sinister yet seductive, all copies from pulp novel covers; joke text paintings, simple block lettering of his own or appropriated jokes. Often labelled an artist of the Pictures Generation alongside Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo Prince has been said to be the contemporary artist who most understands the depth and influence of mass media over life in the 20th and 21st centuries. In whichever medium Prince chooses to work, he stays within the realm of appropriation. Of course Prince is not met without controversy, and he has been on the losing end of several lawsuits involving copyright infringement. His "Instagram" series — unedited reproductions of content posted by models, influencers and celebrities on their personal feeds — sold for upwards of $100,000 at prima