RICHARD PRINCE – NEW FIGURES
2014-10-20The found photographs in the “Cutouts” and “New Figures” evoke the sex pictures mothers once called ”dirty,” but whose children would become the social revolutionaries of the Woodstock Generation; the drawn lines, pale colors, and collaged shapes look back further to Picasso’s elegant lines and Matisse’s scissor-snipped collages, before American art went Pop and life turned electronic. Some of the girls are covered with drawn bodies, another’s arms morph into geometric or schematic appendages in a freehand combination of image, design, and drawing. They also reveal an artist—perhaps the best of his generation— with the technical and artistic freedom to create an unexpected art from an earlier era’s techniques into one that is easily as good and yet wholly contemporary.
Early on Richard Prince explained his “rephotographs” with an alteration of American poet Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum, circa 1914, “Make It New,” in the phrase, circa 1980, “make it again.” Pound’s “it” expressed a modernist’s fedupness with “tradition”; Richard’s referred to modernism’s newness seen through the lens the television and space age. He always looked for subjects that hadn’t been co-opted by art, like jokes, car parts, and B-girls, then creating memory images with familiar photographs and objects as if someone or something else had made them. He made it look easy and natural, which is what television watchers and moviegoers wanted: an art made with the casual élan of Zorro sword-tickling a “Z” on Sargent Garcia’s blouse; an art that combined originality and the suspension of belief as in film’s special effects. The “New Figures” and Cutouts” combine ease, confidence, and special effects. More than that, they project a more complex and more diffident ego from Matisse or Picasso’s, in a manner more complex than their pictorially reductive modernism. Richard achieves newness using today’s complex imaging methods.
Exhibition runs through to December 12th, 2014
Almine Rech Gallery
64 Rue de Turenne
75003 Paris
