Exhibition from October 19 to 22
A proposition by Christophe Daviet-Thery – Presentation on Saturday, October 22, 2022 at 5 pm
Richard Prince is one of the pioneers of the art of appropriation. By (re)photographing advertising images or recycling elements of American popular culture – whether westerns, comics or pulp fictions – he questions the fundamentals and construction of American mythology and the hierarchy between “high” and “low” art.
His production of images also raises questions related to the authorship of the work, plagiarism and intellectual property, and the diffusion and circulation of images.
In the 1980s, Richard Prince began his series of cowboys by cropping and removing the slogans from Marlboro advertising campaign images, which he had discovered in the late 1970s while working at Time / LIFE Magazine.
Beyond the conceptual dimension of his approach and its questioning of what it means to photograph, this series of images also examines the construction of a mythology as an element of a collective memory and identification.
The cowboy is a solitary hero, dominating the wilderness, riding in wide-open spaces. He is a symbol of freedom and masculinity, an idealized figure that we find in paintings by Frederic Remington (1861 – 1909) and in films starring John Wayne. The cowboy embodies an “American iconography” that advertising widely used and disseminated.
The cowboy theme inspired the selection shown here, taken from a vast choice of books ranging from War Pictures, published in New York in 1980, to New Paintings, published in 2022.
On this occasion, an updated version of Bibliothèque d’un Amateur, Richard Prince’s Publications (Christophe Daviet-Thery, July 2022) will be presented and available.
