Richard Prince (Contemporary Artists (Phaidon))

Richard Prince emerged in the 1980s as one of America's new, highly innovative artists who worked with the margins of American subcultures and visual debris. Highly idiosyncratic subject matter - such as one-line jokes, cartoons, cowboys (borrowed from the Marlboro ads) and motorcycle gangs - are central to his work. In the late 1970s Prince was working for the cutting services of Time Life publications in New York, and had access to thousands of cut-up magazines of which only the advertisements remained intact. He began to re-photograph the advertisements and compose his own pictures from this highly familiar, Pop imagery - updating Pop Art's homage to consumerism and its icons in the 1960s. Recently Prince's work has taken an unexpected turn, and the artist has emerged as a consummate painter, producing some of the most unusual and admired works in the current painting scene.