The artist made this photographic edition for the Printed Matter Benefit at the 2006 NY Art Book Fair. The image is from Prince’s Untitled (Couple) series of the late 1970s, but was not produced until now. The edition is signed, and lettered from a to z.
Prince’s work acts as a revival of the image through photography–rephotographed reproduced photographs–after the impasses of conceptualism. Prince’s work relates to images appearing in illustrated magazines, advertising, and television during the artist’s formative years: critic Michael Newman argues that the vintage TV series The Twilight Zone is crucial to understanding Prince’s use of images in his work. During the 1960s, structuralism recast the image as text; Prince’s Couples series revived the image in such a way that it is irreducible to text.
The work of Richard Prince (b. 1949) has been the subject of major solo exhibitions, most recently “Canaries in the Coal Mine,” Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo (2006); “The Early Works,” Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2007); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007, traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Serpentine Gallery, London, through 2008); “American Prayer,” Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2011); “Prince/Picasso,” Picasso Museum, Spain (2012); and “It’s a Free Concert,” Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2014). Prince’s works are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Fine Arts Collection, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Prince lives and works in New York.
