Conceived by the artist, this book gathers unpublished images and well-known works using T-Shirts as a medium. Brilliantly laid-out and composed, the book is full of wit, humor, and surprising encounters.
Casually stretched, messily painted, and intimate in scale, the T-shirt paintings both mirror Prince's more known work and co-exist alongside it, exploring other avenues of the artist's persona. The T-shirt paintings vary in theme and style: some contain iconic Richard Prince jokes; some exploit Prince's interest in hippie and rock and roll subcultures; others are abstract. A handful of childlike animal and flower drawings that normally hang in Prince's daughter's bedroom appear together with T-shirts adorned with Jimi Hendrix and the CD labels from his collection of Led Zeppelin albums. In these works, techniques, genres and subjects collide, finding their commonality in Prince's fluency between them and in his ability to make them all seem equal. What remains a constant is the “canvas” on which the works appear: the stretched, distressed, ordinary T-shirt with all that this cultural icon connotes.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Richard Prince – T-Shirt Paintings: Hippie Punk at Salon 94, New York, in 2010.
American artist Richard Prince (born 1949 in Panama Canal Zone, lives and works in New York) recycles found materials from American popular culture, most often images from advertisement and magazine photography which he re-photographs, silkscreens, overpaints, frames, enlarges, or arranges in collages, playing with their somehow empty meaning. Citation, détournement,
appropriation: any possible treatment of these clichés is explored and played with.
