By Richard Prince
Located in Toronto, Ontario
Richard Prince (b. 1949) is one of the most innovative and polemic American artists. Whether you associate him with The Pictures Generation, Post-Modernism, or appropriation art, his contribution is undeniable.
Prince has worked in a variety of formats over the course of his career, yet each of his series shares a similar approach: extract an element from America's visual culture and elevate it similar to Duchamp's urinal.
Prince's key ingredients come through mass media. Whether it's nurses from the covers of pulp fiction novels, macho cowboys in Marlboro ads, or supermodel selfies, Prince reflects and subverts the gauntlet of American imagery.
Prince is an avid book collector and bibliophile, owning a massive collection of American postwar literature. He began appropriating pulp fiction paperback covers with his "Nurse" series first exhibited in 2003. Prince would scan the cover of pulp paperbacks, transfer them to canvas and paint, collage, and/or otherwise modify the covers. "Nurses" enhanced and subverted female nurses as a rampant source of fetishized sexual objectification in American adult pulp fiction.
In "Fulton Ryder After Dark", Prince continues to confront prevalent depictions of forbidden sexuality seen through the male gaze. The work consists of two images side by side in a diptych style.
On the right is a smaller image containing the (modified) cover of a novel "Fulton Ryder After Dark", while on the left is the enlarged painting originally used for the cover devoid of any text. The book cover titled "Fulton Ryder After Dark" is clearly from the retro-horror genre of pulp fiction, featuring a mysterious pair of floating hands ominously emerging from a blue background and violently strangling a woman. Dressed in a low cut white silk night gown...
Category
2010s Contemporary Richard Prince Art