Hetzler | Marfa is pleased to announce Posters, a solo exhibition of works by Richard Prince, for the gallery’s annual presentation in Marfa, Texas. One of the foremost representatives of appropriation art, Richard Prince has been recontextualising images and ideas from mass media, advertising and entertainment since the 1970s. Often based on products of everyday American culture, his practice is one of ‘post-production’, which reworks cultural phenomena and their attributes to rewrite received narratives and our understanding of history.
The present exhibition brings together a large body of Princes’ Poster works on canvas and on paper, created between 2014 and 2024. The large canvases show reproductions of advertisements for mailorder posters, as were often found at the back of magazines in the second half of the 20th century. Hugely popular at the time, these printed images represent touchstones of early counter-cultural magazines, which are among Princes’ long-term interests. The motifs of political slogans and far-out art in the form of cheap posters are singled out and chosen by the artist. They find their origins in the hippie head-shop culture of the late ’60s, which also encompassed magazines, music and comedy records. Taped-off and blocked-out from the pages where they were listed, the images have been blown up so that the resulting works are far larger than the original posters.
In their seemingly arbitrary selection, the poster images combine anti-war slogans, reproductions of Modern art, graphic-design interpretations of nude couples, and pictures of cats in sometimes humorously disparate compilations. The revolutionary attitude of the late ’60s student protests is juxtaposed against the self-indulgence of hippie culture in this side-by-side illustration of popular visual language.
If cultural attitudes are transported through everyday imagery, then Prince makes them transparent by applying the focus of his artistic practice to these source materials. Method and implication are translated into different contexts and, with his meticulous attention to detail, the artist decodes the communication of contemporary visual language and the ideas which are concealed within it.