RICHARD PRINCE

—Richard Prince

LONDON, September 11, 2023—Gagosian is pleased to announce Early Photography, 1977–87,an exhibition by Richard Prince opening at the Grosvenor Hill and Davies Street galleries inLondon on October 5, 2023. The exhibition features many of Prince’s iconic cowboy, girlfriend,and advertisement photographs, some of which have not previously been exhibited in the city. TheDavies Street gallery hosts work solely from Entertainers (1982–83), while the gallery at Grosvenor Hillfeatures works from several other series.

Collecting, chronicling, and repurposing examples of discomfiting mainstream humor alongsideimages from a variety of mass media, Prince chronicles the intersection of America’s vernacularsand subcultures in the construction of its national identity. In 1977, he began using a process of ‘rephotography’ to appropriate shots from advertising and lifestyle press, redefining the concepts ofauthorship and originality—an approach he would later extend to include social media. A consciouselision of the aims and techniques of traditional picture-making, the technique allows Prince toredirect the authority of a visual referent. ‘When you put an already existing image in front of acamera,’ he explains, ‘you know what you’re going to get. You’ve taken out the decisive moment.’

In the black-and-white photograph Untitled (Self-Portrait) (1980), Prince portrays himself in eyemakeup and lipstick along with a suit and tie, plumbing themes of alienation and uncertainty foundthroughout his oeuvre. As Prince wrote in his 1983 essay ‘Cowboys: The Perfect Tense,’ ‘Some people would like to try to change places, just for a day, with maybe someone they admired or evenenvied, to see what it would be like, to see if it would be what they’d always heard it would be.’ InUntitled (Cowboy) (1980–84), Prince shows his subject merging with the landscape of the AmericanWest, accentuating a heroic individualism.

In works such as Untitled (Couple) (1977) and Untitled (Man Looking to the Left) (1978), Prince explorestropes of masculinity in rephotographed images of square-jawed, suit-wearing models, calling theirauthenticity into question through a focus on heavily styled representation. Other works depictadvertisements for objects such as luxury watches and pens—items that Prince has described as

being foreign to him—in a polished but generic manner that suggests a lack of individual author.From Prince’s perspective, this makes his sources fair game for recontexualization; he categorizes theoriginal photographers as having been commissioned: ‘They were for hire,’ he states, ‘I was workingin a completely different way.’

Many of the works reveal a fascination with the photographic medium as a tool for categorizationand cataloguing that exhibits a sociological and anthropological slant: Untitled (Three Women Lookingin the Same Direction) (1980) assembles its subjects purely according to the attitude of their heads;Criminals and Celebrities (1986) groups images of the famous and the infamous in the act of attemptingto shield themselves from the camera’s intrusive gaze; and Untitled (Fainted) (1980) gathers fourstills of unconscious women. In this, Prince’s organization of images mirrors the currency (andinherently partial nature) of stock photography and anticipates the ubiquity of categorized and labeledphotographic images in the era of Internet searches and artificial intelligence—a period during whichthe medium has become at once more available and less ‘reliable’ than ever.