RICHARD PRINCE - Body at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2023

RICHARD PRINCE
Body
Potsdamer Straße 77-87
3 November 2023 - 10 February 2024
Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Richard Prince at Potsdamer Straße 77-87, in Berlin. This is the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery.
Cropped, pasted, painted and scanned, the exhibited works testify to Prince’s longstanding preoccupation with collecting and repurposing images while placing a renewed emphasis on the importance of the corporeal in his oeuvre. In these compositions, Prince splinters and reassembles photographic fragments of the female figure with varying degrees of legibility. The resulting collages assemble a new ‘body’, complicating notions of authorship and building on the tradition of figure painting.
Since the late 1970s, Prince has chronicled a wealth of images that haunt the American psyche - from cowboys and biker chicks to cars, nurses, and gag cartoons. In 1977, while working in the tear sheets department of Time Life, Prince began rephotographing discarded advertisements, removing all text before blurring, cropping, enlarging and, at times, grouping them for his own compositions. The human figure has also continued to be a crucial through-line, tracing back to the artist’s studies in the late 1960s and the figure drawing classes he attended upon his move to New York in 1974. Thinking about human flesh is ‘second nature’, Prince notes. ‘It grounds you and makes you think about posture.’
Fragmented and removed from their original context, some body parts remain recognisable as breasts, buttocks, bellybuttons and torsos, while others appear entirely abstracted, their curvatures recalling landscapes or dispersing into pure form. From up close, certain skins are grainy and textured, while the glossy surfaces of others evoke the cool smoothness of classical busts.
Remnants of tape used by the artist testify to the physical construction of these works, as do the visible brushstrokes that delineate the backgrounds of the darker images. In some compositions, Prince draws over his collages, extending the reconstructed bodies to endow them with grotesque feet, hands, and heads. Distinctions between printing and painting, natural and artificial, as much as the artist’s body and the body of the anonymous subject, thus literally and conceptually converge.
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