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Canal de Panamá (Panamá), 1949

Prince is one of the artists who employs "rephotographs" (photographs of photographs) to elicit, on art's own terms, a reflection on reality, on reproducibility and fiction, utilizing imagery taken from the world of advertising and television for his own work. During the late seventies, he began to produce series of colour photographs of luxury items, extracted from advertisements, watches, jewellery or ballpoint pens, and thus initiating a discourse -which he was to maintain throughout his career- based on the need to employ artistic reproduction in the mass media, as in the series of images retrieved from newspapers, Three men looking in the same direction (1978) and Three women looking in the same direction (1980), an ironic vision of the archetypical models in contemporary society, which were followed by a search for doses of reality, as in the photographs Sunset (1981) or Gangs (1984).

Nevertheless, it is in the series Cowboy (1980-1986) where he most fittingly expressed his concern with the image as part of artistic reproducibility. In this series, he reflected on current mythic heroes and, specifically, masculine ideals in American society; again juxtaposing the concept of masculine identity with fiction and reality, since the existing image signifies an unattainable concept, which for Prince is true of advertising in general. Concurrent with this work, he produced another, one of his most noted series, Girlfriends, which exempliies the epitome of implicit misogyny, and is succeeded by the series Cowboys and Girlfriends (1987). Through his work, Richard Prince provides us with an analysis of the commonplace, based on the elements we observe in the mass-media and advertising, hence the observation of advertising codes and images of the characters appearing in them, such as the photographs Untitled (Entertainers) (1984) or Portraits (1984-85).

In 1986, he abandoned the use of the rephotograph and turned to the use of images appropriated from comics, through drawing and silk-screen processes, where he inserted easy popular jokes such as that in the series Jokes (1986-1993), with which he offered a vision of the average American male. He also inserted ironic commentaries, most of which addressed sexual topics and questions of gender. The use of drawings resembling this popular format once again called to question the subliminal undertones directed at the collective conscience. During the mid-nineties, he produced enormous expressionist-like canvases in which, behind the thick layers of colour, there are hidden phrases that again play on vulgar jokes, once again commenting ironically on the very society we live in.

One of his latest series of paintings is Nurses (2003), produced in large-scale format and where the main theme is the figure of the nurse, a female symbol he relates to the covers of some romantic novels that resort to the symbolic strength of this figure. His constant concern in Richard Prince's work with codes of simulation gives rise to a vision of post-modern life that leads to literary structures by way of text. He conveys a complex vision of the world without failing to address the History of Art itself. Prince's irony and his subversive messages have made him one of the basic referents of contemporary art. T. P.