Beschreibung:

Richard Prince Oh Henry 2003 Acrylic and t-shirts on canvas. 75 x 110 in. (190.5 x 279.4 cm).
Provenance Gladstone Gallery, New York; Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Collection, Boston; Luhring Augustine, New York Exhibited New York, Gladstone Gallery, Richard Prince April 30 – June 18, 2005; New York, Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, September 28, 2007 – January 9, 2008; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, March 22 – June 15, 2008 and London, Serpentine Gallery, June 26 – September 7, 2008, Richard Prince Spiritual America Literature B. Appel, “Richard Prince,” artcritical.com (online content), July 2005; N. Spector, Richard Prince New York, 2007, p. 187 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay Can a joke be a painting? More to the point, can a painting be a joke? Richard Prince has spent the better part of the last two decades trying to answer these questions, engaging in a voyage to the center of painting’s very own heart of darkness. Starting his journey in 1987, Prince broadened his aesthetic strategies beyond the realm of photographic appropriation and into the body, if not the soul, of painterly expression. As he moved in this painterly direction, was Prince the equivalent of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in Francis Ford Copppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now, disappearing up the river into Camboida in an attempt to take post war painting practices to their excessive logical conclusions? Or was he more akin to Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard, setting out on a classified recon mission with orders to exterminate painting with extreme prejudice? In the end, perhaps he is more like the comedian Bob Hope singing his theme song “Thanks for the Memories” on a USO tour in Saigon because at the core of his painting agenda rests the repetitious, twisted structural logic of the joke, a staple of old school stand up comedy. D. Fogle “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Joke (Painting),” Parkett 72, New York/Zurich 2004, p. 108 Oh Henry, completed in 2003, is a large-scale joke painting Richard Prince rendered on a smooth, powdery surface. The plush pastel hues shy away from his more stark, monochromatic paintings from earlier on in his career. The present lot embodies an advanced take on his joke theme, employing a wider range of color that ultimately presents a composition more in tune with his painterly Nurse series and most recent de Kooning-esque Women series, where vivid colors and imagery coalesce. The joke itself, written large across the entire width of the canvas of the left canvas and fading into the t-shirt covered right panel, is stenciled in place with a conviction for design; Prince’s large yellow Helvetica type breaks the canvas in two, yet simultaneously appears to meld each visual reference taking place before your eyes in a highly stylized and provocative manner. Mr. Prince has devoted his career to this surface unreality, attempting to collect, count and order its ways. He has said that his goal is a ‘virtuoso real’, something beyond real that is patently fake. But his art is inherently corrosive; it eats through things. His specialty is a carefully constructed hybrid that is also some kind of joke, charged by conflicting notions of high, low and lower... [Borscht belt jokes] are a signature staple…appearing on modernist monochromes, on fields of checks and as arbitrary punch lines for postwar New Yorker or Playboy cartoons. These examples of a better class of humor are variously whole, fragmented, steeped in white or piled into colorful, nearly abstract patterns yet still retain their familiarity. The same jokes occur in different works, alternately write big or little, sharp or fading, straight or rippled as if spoken by someone on a bender. R. Smith “Pilfering From a culture Out of Joint”, The New York Times, September 28, 2007 Prince started telling jokes, or rather retelling jokes, in the 1980s when he began to reproduce illustrations from The New Yorker in graphite on an intimate scale. His attraction to the humor in the cheap joke is perfectly in tune with his interest in low cultural forms. These works soon evolved away