This dude likes to 're-photograph' things.
So many times when I read about an artist it seems like a waste of time to rewrite a perfectly good description of the history of that artist, so here's a very good description found at metmuseaums.org
'In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements, featuring gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them, using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. In so doing, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the images, revealing them as hallucinatory fictions of society's desires.'
He's arguably most famous for his piece 'Untitled (Cowboy)' from 1989. It got sold in New York and was the first 'rephotograph' to raise over $1 at an auction, in 2005. The photo was originally taken by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement. Here's a very respectable explanation about the meaning and story behind the work. (also from met museums.org)
'Untitled (Cowboy) is a high point of the artist's ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as timely as then-outgoing president Ronald Reagan. Prince's picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Perpetually disappearing into the sunset, this lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, Untitled (Cowboy) is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture's continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience.'
So many times when I read about an artist it seems like a waste of time to rewrite a perfectly good description of the history of that artist, so here's a very good description found at metmuseaums.org
'In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements, featuring gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them, using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. In so doing, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the images, revealing them as hallucinatory fictions of society's desires.'
He's arguably most famous for his piece 'Untitled (Cowboy)' from 1989. It got sold in New York and was the first 'rephotograph' to raise over $1 at an auction, in 2005. The photo was originally taken by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement. Here's a very respectable explanation about the meaning and story behind the work. (also from met museums.org)
'Untitled (Cowboy) is a high point of the artist's ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as timely as then-outgoing president Ronald Reagan. Prince's picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Perpetually disappearing into the sunset, this lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, Untitled (Cowboy) is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture's continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience.'
And here's the image:
He does a lot of other cool stuff, and has tried out a range of different styles, but generally it seems his strongest and most common theme is picking out interesting pictures, quotes, and silly little things often found in the news that you wouldn't generally have noticed otherwise. Often he will just write one of these lines on a colored or even simply a white canvas in quotation marks, and that's his artwork:
They're often funny, but always interesting. You should definitely check out his website for more.
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