Richard Prince Sold at Auction Prices

Sculptor, b. 1949 -

(b Panama Canal Zone, 1949) Contemporary American Photographer and Painter. Moving to New York in the early 70s, Prince worked as a magazine clipper, were he was inspired to use the left over advertisements from the clippings in his artwork. Launching his career in the 1980s, Prince directly lifted found images and reproduced them in a Fine Art context, through photography. Prince’s use of the Marlboro man was his most popular work at this time. His subjects also include biker chicks and his series of joke paintings. In 2002, Prince’s nurse paintings were unveiled at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, in New York. In this new series, Prince revisits with discernible maturity many of the themes that were present at the outset of his career - the manipulation of appropriated images, the seductiveness of mass culture and the death of the author - in an entirely new, painterly syntax. For the nurses, Prince's source material is culled from the artist's extensive collection of 1960s racy paperback nurse fantasies, a sub-genre of pulp fiction.* Prince currently lives and works in New York. (Credit: Sotheby’s London, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, July 1, 2008, Lot 22.)