RICHARD PRINCE

– Richard Prince, 2015

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present a solo exhibition by RichardPrince at Potsdamer Straße 77-87, in Berlin. This is the artist’s secondsolo presentation with the gallery.

Cropped, pasted, painted and scanned, the exhibited works testify toPrince’s longstanding preoccupation with collecting and repurposingimages while placing a renewed emphasis on the importance of thecorporeal in his oeuvre. In these compositions, Prince splinters andreassembles photographic fragments of the female figure with varyingdegrees of legibility. The resulting collages assemble a new ‘body’,complicating notions of authorship and building on the tradition offigure painting.

Since the late 1970s, Prince has chronicled a wealth of images thathaunt the American psyche – from cowboys and biker chicks to cars,nurses, and gag cartoons. In 1977, while working in the tear sheetsdepartment of Time Life, Prince began rephotographing discardedadvertisements, removing all text before blurring, cropping, enlargingand, at times, grouping them for his own compositions. The humanfigure has also continued to be a crucial through-line, tracing back tothe artist’s studies in the late 1960s and the figure drawing classes heattended upon his move to New York in 1974. Thinking about humanflesh is ‘second nature’, Prince notes. ‘It grounds you and makes youthink about posture.’

Fragmented and removed from their original context, some body partsremain recognisable as breasts, buttocks, bellybuttons and torsos,while others appear entirely abstracted, their curvatures recallinglandscapes or dispersing into pure form. From up close, certain skinsare grainy and textured, while the glossy surfaces of others evoke thecool smoothness of classical busts.

Remnants of tape used by the artist testify to the physical constructionof these works, as do the visible brushstrokes that delineate thebackgrounds of the darker images. In some compositions, Princedraws over his collages, extending the reconstructed bodies to endowthem with grotesque feet, hands, and heads. Distinctions betweenprinting and painting, natural and artificial, as much as the artist’s bodyand the body of the anonymous subject, thus literally and conceptuallyconverge.