Richard Prince

Richard Prince
b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone | Lives and works in New York

Richard Prince is a pioneering American artist best known for his groundbreaking work in appropriation art, which challenges traditional notions of authorship, authenticity, and originality. Emerging in the late 1970s and associated with the Pictures Generation, Prince rose to prominence through his technique of rephotography—reproducing existing images from advertising, magazines, and popular culture to expose their constructed meanings and cultural impact.

His early Cowboys series, rephotographed Marlboro cigarette ads, deconstructed the American myth of rugged masculinity, while later works such as the Nurse Paintings, Joke Paintings, and Instagram Portraits pushed the boundaries of taste, humor, and social critique. Prince's practice spans photography, painting, collage, artist’s books, and sculpture, often blurring the lines between high and low culture, the personal and the public, the real and the reproduced.

Over the past four decades, Prince’s work has been exhibited in major institutions worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Serpentine Gallery, and is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Tate, and the Centre Pompidou. Both controversial and influential, he remains one of the most significant figures in postmodern and contemporary art.