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Last Chance to See The Entertainers by Richard Prince at Gagosian
This autumn, Gagosian in London presented two exhibitions by Richard Prince. ‘The Entertainers’ at the Davies Street Gallery is open to visitors until Thursday, November 16th. The exhibition showcases a rarely-seen collection of photographs taken in the bars, clubs, and restaurants of New York’s Times Square, capturing aspiring actresses, models, and singers on a single sheet of photographic paper. To convey the location’s sleazy glamour, Prince softened the focus, heightened the contrast, and infused the original images with bright colors and graphic elements. The second exhibition, ‘Early Photography, 1977–87,‘ at the Grosvenor Hill Gallery, features works from several other series and remains on view until December 22, 2023.
Richard Prince, an American artist and pioneer of Appropriation Art, gained recognition for his practice of ‘re-photographing,’ capturing images from advertising in magazines. Born on August 6, 1949, in what was then the Panama Canal Zone, Prince moved to New York in 1973. He worked for the magazine publisher Time Inc., where he began photographing advertising on the pages of magazines, identifying typologies and repeating archetypes.
In his work, Prince appropriates visuals from advertising, entertainment, lifestyle press, and social media, pushing the boundaries of authorship, originality, and authenticity. By collecting and repurposing images from various mainstream mass media, Prince documents the intersection of America’s subcultures in the construction of its national identity. This controversial practice within the art world has sparked debates about copyright, intellectual property, and theft. Adopting a pop art style, Prince shares similarities with artists like Sherrie Levine, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons. Like his predecessors, Prince applies commercial art processes to mass imagery, revealing the social themes and concerns in his work.
His famous series ‘Cowboys’ (1980-1992, ongoing) was inspired by the advertising campaign of the Marlboro cigarette brand. In the black-and-white photograph ‘Untitled (Self-Portrait)’ (1980), Prince explores the themes of alienation and uncertainty, portraying himself in eye makeup and lipstick along with a suit and tie. In ‘Untitled (Cowboy)’ (1980–84), Prince depicts his subject merging with the landscape of the American West, emphasizing a heroic individualism.
Other Prince’s works depict advertisements for objects such as luxury watches and pens—items that Prince has described as foreign to him—in a polished but generic manner, suggesting a lack of individual authorship. Many of his works reveal a fascination with the photographic medium as a tool for categorization and cataloging. From Prince’s perspective, this makes his sources fair game for recontextualization, as he categorizes the original photographers as having been commissioned. Turning his lens to an eclectic range of subjects, from cowboys as a homogeneous idealization of the Wild West to his photographs of luxury watches and pens, Prince was, above all, interested in the sociological perspective that photography imbued on a subject.
The exhibitions at Gagosian feature many of Prince’s iconic artworks and advertisement photographs, some of which have not been previously exhibited in the city.
