Hetzler | Marfa is happy to announce Posters, a solo exhibition of works by Richard Prince, for the gallery’s annual presentation in Marfa, Texas. One of many foremost representatives of appropriation artwork, Richard Prince has been recontextualising photos and concepts from mass media, promoting and leisure because the Seventies. Typically primarily based on merchandise of on a regular basis American tradition, his observe is one among ‘post-production’, which reworks cultural phenomena and their attributes to rewrite acquired narratives and our understanding of historical past.
The current exhibition brings collectively a big physique of Princes’ Poster works on canvas and on paper, created between 2014 and 2024. The massive canvases present reproductions of ads for mailorder posters, as have been usually discovered in the back of magazines within the second half of the twentieth century. Vastly well-liked on the time, these printed photos signify touchstones of early counter-cultural magazines, that are amongst Princes’ long-term pursuits. The motifs of political slogans and far-out artwork within the type of low-cost posters are singled out and chosen by the artist. They discover their origins within the hippie head-shop tradition of the late ’60s, which additionally encompassed magazines, music and comedy data. Taped-off and blocked-out from the pages the place they have been listed, the pictures have been blown up in order that the ensuing works are far bigger than the unique posters.
Of their seemingly arbitrary choice, the poster photos mix anti-war slogans, reproductions of Fashionable artwork, graphic-design interpretations of nude {couples}, and photos of cats in generally humorously disparate compilations. The revolutionary angle of the late ’60s pupil protests is juxtaposed in opposition to the self-indulgence of hippie tradition on this side-by-side illustration of well-liked visible language.
If cultural attitudes are transported by on a regular basis imagery, then Prince makes them clear by making use of the main target of his inventive observe to those supply supplies. Methodology and implication are translated into completely different contexts and, along with his meticulous consideration to element, the artist decodes the communication of latest visible language and the concepts that are hid inside it.
