EAST HAMPTON, NY.- Guild Hall of East Hampton presents Richard Prince “Covering Pollock” featuring 27 new works that are focused on Jackson Pollock, a leader of the Abstract Expressionist group. The exhibition opens on Saturday August 13 and runs through October 17, 2011 throughout the entire museum. Acknowledged as one of the most important and influential artists of our time, Richard Prince uses appropriation to distill and disrupt America’s compulsive fascination with iconic brands, fame, and lifestyle. This is the first public viewing of “Covering Pollock” and the first museum exhibition of Richard Prince’s work on Long Island.
Prince states, “Five years ago, I drew over a deKooning book and made paintings that were a take-off on deKooning's 'Women' series. I also made the hand-drawn and collaged Franz Kline book as well. I think about what I can add to that history, to their work. With deKooning, it was the male figure; with Klein, it was Betty Page. With Pollock, I'm imagining what he would do today if he were still alive - what music he would listen to, what activities he would be involved with.”
Prince’s new series is based upon photographs of Jackson Pollock at work in his East Hampton studio. Taken when Pollock was at the peak of career, the black and white images depict the energy and genius of Pollock at work…circling, studying and completely immersed in painting the flat, un-stretched canvas on the floor. Prince, using his appropriation technique, incorporates both paint and collage including shard-like grids of portraits, cut-outs of fashion models, vintage erotica, New Yorker illustrations, Playboy cartoons, canceled checks, color forms, layering them to both cover and expose Pollock. Thus he simultaneously deflects and reflects the subject as well as our own ceaseless preoccupations with Pollock’s life, his art and his myth.
In 2007, the Guggenheim presented a critical examination of Prince’s work and in an overview stated: “Prince is one of the most innovative American artists to have emerged during the last 30 years. His deceptively simple act in 1977 of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to art making; one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object. Prince's technique involves appropriation; he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of popular culture to create works that simultaneously embrace and critique a quintessentially American sensibility: the Marlboro Man, muscle cars, biker chicks, crude jokes, gag cartoons, and pulp fiction.”
Richard Prince “Covering Pollock” exhibition will be accompanied by a color brochure with an interview by Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, New Museum of Contemporary Art. Phillips organized Richard Prince’s first museum exhibition in l992 for the Whitney Museum which subsequently travelled to San Francisco MOMA , and the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Holland. Additionally, there is an essay by Christina Mossaides Strassfield, Guild Hall Museum Director/Chief Curator.
Richard Prince was born in 1949. He lives and works in his home and studio in upstate New York and Wainscott. He is married to the artist Noel Grunwaldt and they have two children. Prince was the 2010 recipient of the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts.
Richard Prince “Covering Pollock” is sponsored in part through the generosity of Lead Sponsors: Barbara and Richard Lane, Donald R. Mullen, Mark and Marisa Borghi, and Co-Sponsors: Sandra and Stephen Abramson, The Broad Art Foundation, Denise LeFrak and John Calicchio, Alexandra and Steven Cohen, Gagosian Gallery, Ray Learsy and Melva Bucksbaum, and Wally Findlay Galleries.
