Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero Angulo (born April 19, 1932) is a Colombian figurative artist, self-titled “the most Colombian of Colombian artists”. He came to national prominence when he won the first prize at the Salón de Artistas Colombianosin 1958. Working most of the year in Paris, in the last three decades he has achieved international recognition for his paintings, drawings and sculpture, with exhibitions across the world.

Early life and education

Fernando Botero was born the second of three children in Medellín, Antioquia, in the mountains of Colombia. His parents were David Botero and Flora Angulo. David Botero, a salesman who traveled by horseback, died when the boy was age four, and his mother worked as a seamstress. An uncle took a major role in his life. Although isolated from art as presented in museums and other cultural institutes, Botero was influenced by the Baroque style of the colonial churches and then the rich life of the city.

In 1944, after Botero attended a Jesuit school, Botero’s uncle sent him to a school for matadors for two years.In 1948, at the age of 16, Botero published his first illustrations in the Sunday supplement of the El Colombiano daily paper. He used the money he was paid to attend high school at the Liceo de Marinilla de Antioquia.

1948 was the year Botero was first exhibited, in a group show along with other artists from the region. From 1949 to 1950, Botero worked as a set designer, before moving to Bogotá in 1951. His first one-man show was held at the Galería Leo Matiz in Bogotá, a few months after his arrival. In 1952, Botero travelled with a group of artists toBarcelona, where he stayed briefly before moving on to Madrid.

In Madrid, Botero studied at the Academia de San Fernando. In 1952, he traveled to Bogotá, where he had a solo exhibit at the Leo Matiz gallery. Later that year, he won the ninth edition of the Salón de Artistas Colombianos.

In 1953, Botero moved to Paris, where he spent most of his time in the Louvre, studying the works there. He lived in Florence, Italy from 1953 to 1954, studying the works of Renaissance masters. In recent decades, he has lived most of the time in Paris, but spends one month a year in his native city of Medellín. He has had more than 50 exhibits in major cities worldwide, and his work commands selling prices in the millions of dollars.

Fernando Botero.  ”Dancers”,   Bronze  2007

While his work includes still-lifes and landscapes, Botero has concentrated on situational portraiture. His paintings and sculptures are united by their proportionally exaggerated, or “fat” figures, as he once referred to them.

Botero explains his use of these “large people”, as they are often called by critics, in the following way:

“An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.“

Botero is an abstract artist in the most fundamental sense, choosing colors, shapes, and proportions based on intuitive aesthetic thinking. Though he spends only one month a year in Colombia, he considers himself the “most Colombian artist living” due to his insulation from the international trends of the art world.

In 2004 Botero exhibited a series of 27 drawings and 23 paintings dealing with the violence in Colombia from the drug cartels. He donated the works to the National Museum of Colombia, where they were first exhibited.

In 2005 Botero gained considerable attention for his Abu Ghraib series, which was exhibited first in Europe. He based the works on reports of United States forces’ abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War. Beginning with an idea he had on a plane journey, Botero produced more than 85 paintings and 100 drawings in exploring this concept and “painting out the poison.”The series was exhibited at two United States locations in 2007, including Washington, DC. Botero said he would not sell any of the works, but would donate them to museums.

In 2006, after having focused exclusively on the Abu Ghraib series for over 14 months, Botero returned to the themes of his early life such as the family and maternity. In his “Une Famille” Botero represented the Colombian family, a subject often painted in the seventies and eighties. In his “Maternity”, Botero repeated a composition he already painted in 2003, being able to evoke a sensuous velvety texture that lends it a special appeal and testifies for a personal involvement of the artist. Interestingly, the Child in the 2006 drawing has a wound in his right chest as if the Author wanted to identify him with Jesus Christ, thus giving it a religious meaning that was absent in the 2003 artwork.

In 2008 he exhibited the works of his The Circus collection, featuring 20 works in oil and watercolor. In a 2010 interview, Botero said that he was ready for other subjects: “After all this, I always return to the simplest things: still lifes.”

Marriage and family

Botero married Gloria Zea (who became the Colombian Minister of Culture). Together they had three children: Fernando (who was born while they lived in Mexico City), Lina and Juan Carlos Botero. The senior Boteros divorced in 1960 and each remarried. Starting in 1960, Botero lived for 14 years in New York, but more recently has settled in Paris. Lina also lives outside of Colombia, and in 2000 Juan Carlos moved to southern Florida.

Fernando Botero Zea became a politician and served as Defense Minister. He was convicted in 1996 of a financial offense and served 30 months in prison. Rather than facing a second charge and sentence in 2002, he is staying out of the country in Mexico, where he is a citizen of birth. Lina Botero became an actress and TV presenter.

In 1964 Botero began living with Cecilia Zambrano. They had a son Pedro, born in 1974, and separated in 1975. Pedro was killed in 1979 in a car accident, in which Botero was also injured.

Last Botero married the Greek artist Sophia Vari. They live most of the time in Paris and also have a house in Pietrasanta, Italy.

Recent exhibitions

• “Fund-Raiser” Exhibition with Sonia Falcone at Calvin Charles Gallery [1] (2003), Scottsdale, Arizona.
• “Botero at Ebisu” (2004), Tokyo.
• “Fernando Botero” (2006), Athens.
• “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” (2007), Quebec City
• “Abu Ghraib Exhibit” (2007), University of California, Berkeley
• “Botero: Abu Ghraib” (November 6 – December 30, 2007), American University Museum
• “Botero Abu Ghraib” Exposition (2008), Centro de las Artes I Monterrey, Mexico
• “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” (May 2008), Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington
• “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” (June 28 – September 21, 2008), New Orleans Museum of Art
• “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” (May 30 – August 16, 2009), Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center
• “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” (October 19 – January 11, 2009), Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee
• “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” (September 12, 2009 – December 6, 2009), Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California^[15]
• “Fernando Botero: Works On Paper, Paintings, and Sculptures” (February 11 – March 28, 2010), David Benrimon Fine Art, New York, NY
• “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” (May 1, – July 25, 2010), Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada
• “Botero” (4 May – 18 July 2010), Pera Museum, Istanbul [2]
• “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” (August 21 – November 14, 2010), Glenbow Museum, Calgary
• “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” (December 10, 2010 – February 27, 2011), Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg

Market Analysis

Current High Auction Record

The Musicians Oil on Canvas 1979

The Musicians

Oil on Canvas 1979

Height 85.4 in.; Width 74.8 in.

Christie’s New York: Tuesday, May 23, 2006 [Lot 46]
Latin American Art

Sold For $2,032,000 USD

Botero is probably best known for his large and voluptuous figurative bronzes and the price range for these works begins at around $200,000 USD.  The monumental sculptural works sell for in excess of $1m USD. The very best of the large scale paintings on canvas are in the $1m – $2m USD range.

After studying painting with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture between 1961 and 1964, Serra continued his training abroad, spending a year each in Florence and Paris. In 1964, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for Rome. Since then, he has lived in New York, where he first used rubber in 1966 and began applying his characteristic work material lead in 1968.^[1] In New York, his circle of friends included Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson.^[2]

He is the brother of famed San Francisco trial attorney Tony Serra. Serra lives in Tribeca, New York and on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.

Sculpture

In 1966, Serra made his first sculptures out of nontraditional materials such as fiberglass and rubber. Serra’s earliest work was abstract and process-based made from molten lead hurled in large splashes against the wall of a studio or exhibition space. Still, he is better known for his minimalist constructions from large rolls and sheets of metal. Many of these pieces are self-supporting and emphasize the weight and nature of the materials. Rolls of lead are designed to sag over time. His exterior steel sculptures go through an initial oxidation process, but after 8–10 years, the patina of the steel settles to one color that will remain relatively stable over the piece’s life. Serra often constructs site-specific installations, frequently on a scale that dwarfs the observer.

In 1981, Serra installed Tilted Arc, a gently curved, 3.5 meter high arc of rusting mild steel in the Federal Plaza in New York City. There was controversy over the installation from day one, largely from workers in the buildings surrounding the plaza who complained that the steel wall obstructed passage through the plaza. A public hearing in 1985 voted that the work should be moved, but Serra argued the sculpture was site specific and could not be placed anywhere else. Serra famously issued an often-quoted statement regarding the nature of site-specific art when he said, “To remove the work is to destroy it.” Eventually on 15 March 1989, the sculpture was dismantled by federal workers and taken for scrap. In May 1989 the piece was cut into three parts and consigned to a New York warehouse where it has languished ever since.

The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Another famous work of Serra’s is the mammoth sculpture Snake, a trio of sinuous steel sheets creating a curving path, permanently located in the largest gallery of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. In 2005, the museum mounted an exhibition of more of Serra’s work, incorporating Snake into a collection entitled The Matter of Time. The whole work consists of eight sculptures measuring between 12 and 14 feet in height and weighing from 44 to 276 tons.

He has not always fared so well in Spain, however; also in 2005, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid announced that a 38-tonne sculpture of his had been “mislaid”.^[6] In a recent development, a duplicate copy is going to be made and displayed in Madrid.^[7]

Tilted Spheres in Terminal 1 Pier F at Toronto's YYZ airport

In spring 2005, Serra returned to San Francisco to install his first public work in that city (previous negotiations for a commission fell through) – two 50-foot steel blades in the main open space of the new University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) campus. Weighing 160 tons, placing the work in its Mission Bay location posed serious challenges, since it is, like many parts of San Francisco, built on landfill. In 2000 he installed Charlie Brown, a 60-foot-tall sculpture in the new Gap Inc. headquarters in San Francisco. To encourage oxidation, or rust, sprinklers were initially directed toward the four German-made slabs of steel that make up the work.

From May 7 to June 15, 2008 Richard Serra showed his installation Promenade at the Grand Palais, Paris. “A radical, poetic landscape of steel, minimalist yet full of movement.” Serra was the second artist, after Anselm Kiefer, who was invited to fill the 13,500 m² nave of the Grand Palais with a group of new works created specially for the event.

Prints and Drawings

Since 1971, Serra has focused not only on sculptural works, but also onlarge-scale drawings on paper using various techniques. His drawing material is the paintstick, a wax-like grease crayon. Serra melts several paintsticks to form large pigment blocks. In the mid-1970s, Serra made his first “Installation Drawings” — monumental works on canvas or linen pinned directly to the wall and thickly covered with black paintstick, such as Abstract Slavery, Taraval Beach, Pacific Judson Murphy, and Blank. The drawings Serra has executed since the 1980s continue the experiments with innovative techniques but are less monumental. In the late 1980s he explored how to further articulate the tension of weight and gravity by placing pairs of overlapping sheets of paper saturated with paintstick in horizontal and vertical compositions.

Major presentations of Serra’s graphic oeuvre include exhibitions at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, in 1990; at Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1992; and at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, in 2008. At the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Serra showed a simple litho crayon drawing of an Abu Ghraib prisoner with the caption “STOP BUSH.”^[12] This image was later used by the Whitney Museum to make posters for the Biennial. The posters featured an altered version of the text that read “STOP B S .” Serra also created a variation on Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son featuring George W. Bush’s head in place of Saturn’s. This was featured prominently in an ad for the website pleasevote.com (now defunct) on the back cover of the July 5, 2004 issue of The Nation.

Colby College recently acquired 150 works on paper by Serra, making it the second largest collection of Serra’s work outside of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Exhibitions

Serra had his first solo exhibitions at the Galleria La Salita, Rome, 1966, and in the United States at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York. The Pasadena Art Museum organized a solo exhibition of Serra’s work in 1970. Serra has since participated in Documentas 5 (1972), 6 (1977), 7 (1982), and 8 (1987), in Kassel, the Venice Biennales of 1984 and 2001, and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions of 1968, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1995. Serra was honored with further solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany, in 1978; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1984; the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, in 1985; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1986. From 1997 to 1998 his Torqued Ellipses (1997) were exhibited at and acquired by the Dia Center for the Arts, New York. In 2005 eight major works by Serra were installed permanently at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

In the summer of 2007 the Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective of Serra’s work in New York. Intersection II (1992–1993) and Torqued Ellipse IV (1998) were included in this show along with three new works. The retrospective consisted of 27 of Serra’s works, including three large new sculptures made specifically for the second floor of the museum, two works in the garden, and earlier pieces from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Serra continues to produce large-scale steel structures for sites throughout the world, and has become particularly renowned for his monumental arcs, spirals, and ellipses, which engage the viewer in an altered experience of space. He was invited to create a number of artworks in France: Philibert et Marguerite in the cloister of the Musée de Brou at Bourg-en-Bresse (1985), Octagon for Saint Eloi (1991) in the village of Chagny in Burgundy, and Threats of Hell at the CAPC (Musée d’Art Contemporain) in Bordeaux.^[17]

MARKET ANALYSIS

Current  auction record

Corner Prop Steel in two parts

Height 20 in.; Width 20 in.; Depth 20 in. / Height 50.8 cm.; Width 50.8 cm.; Depth 50.8 cms

Executed in 1976, this work was remade with the artist’s approval from the 1969 lead antimony original

Sotheby’s New York: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 [Lot 00008] Contemporary Art Evening Sale

$1,986,500 USD

The market for works by Serra is split broadly between his steel sculpture and his works on paper, mostly in oil stick. The sculptures are not frequently available at auction and the price structure is tricky to evaluate. Whilst recently two works have made close to the $2m mark, it is interesting to note that these werer both estimated at $2-3m dollars and so performed at a lower level than the market might have anticipated.

Good works in oil stick on paper are in the $100-200,000 dollar range with prints in the $5-15,000 dollar range.

Jim Dine

Jim Dine (born June 16, 1935) is an Americanpop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Walnut Hills High School, the University of Cincinnati, and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with his Happenings. Pioneered with artists Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow, in conjunction with musician John Cage, the “Happenings” were chaotic performance art that was a stark contrast with the more somber mood of the expressionists popular in the New York art world. The first of these was the 30 second The Smiling Worker performed in 1959

Birth of “Pop Art”

In 1962 Dine’s work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Norton Simon Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first “Pop Art” exhibitions in America. These painters started a movement, in a time of social unrest, which shocked America and the Art world and changed modern Art forever, “Pop Art“.

In the early 1960s Dine produced pop art with items from everyday life. These provided commercial as well as critical success, but left Dine unsatisfied. In September 1966 police raided an exhibition of his work displayed atRobert Fraser‘s gallery in London, England. Twenty of his works were seized and Fraser was charged under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, Dine’s work was found to be indecent but not obscene and Fraser was fined 20 guineas. The following year Dine moved to London and continued to be represented by Fraser, spending the next four years developing his art. Returning to the United States in 1971 he focused on several series of drawings. In the 1980s sculpture resumed a prominent place in his art. In the time since then there has been an apparent shift in the subject of his art from man-made objects to nature.

According to James Rado, co-author (with Gerome Ragni) of the rock musical Hair, it was a Dine piece entitled “Hair” which gave the name to the rock musical.

In 1984, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, exhibited his work as “Jim Dine: Five Themes,” and in 1989, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts hosted “Jim Dine Drawings: 1973-1987″.

Little Sweet Heirloom 2007

2000 and On

In 2004, the National Gallery of Art, Washington organized the exhibition, “Drawings of Jim Dine.” In the summer of 2007 he participated in the Chicago public art exhibition “Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet.” He exhibits regularly with the Alan Cristea Gallery in London.

Early in her career, Riley worked as an art teacher from 1957-58 at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Harrow (now known as Sacred Heart Language College. Later she worked at the Loughborough School of Art (1959), then at the Hornsey College of Art, and Croydon College of Art (1962-64). She also worked as an illustrator for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency prior to giving it up in 1964.

Riley and Peter Sedgley created the artists’ organization SPACE, with the goal of providing artists large and affordable studio space.

Career

Riley’s mature style, developed during the 1960s, was influenced by a number of sources. It was during this time that Riley began to paint the black and white works for which she is well known. They present a great variety of geometric forms that produce sensations of movement or colour. In the early 1960s, her works were said to induce sensations in viewers as varied as seasickness and sky diving. Works in this style comprised her first solo show in London in 1962 at Gallery One run by Victor Musgrave, as well as numerous subsequent shows. Visually, these works relate to many concerns of the period: a perceived need for audience participation (this relates them to the Happenings, for which the period is famous), challenges to the notion of the mind-body duality which led some people to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs (see Aldous Huxley‘s writings); concerns with a tension between a scientific future which might be very beneficial or might lead to a nuclear war; and fears about the loss of genuine individual experience in a Brave New World.

In 1965, Riley exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City show, The Responsive Eye (created by curator William C. Seitz); the exhibition which first drew worldwide attention to her work and the Op Art movement. Her painting Current, 1964, was reproduced on the cover of the show’s catalogue. Riley became disillusioned with Op because her work was exploited for commercial purposes.

Riley began investigating colour in 1967, the year in which she produced her first stripe painting. Following a major retrospective in the early 1970s, Riley began travelling extensively. After a trip to Egypt in the early 1980s, where she was inspired by colourful hieroglyphic decoration, Riley began to explore colour and contrast.^[citation needed^] In some works, lines of colour are used to created a shimmering effect, while in others the canvas is filled with tessellating patterns. Typical of these later colourful works is Shadow Play.

In 1968 Riley represented Great Britain in the Venice Biennale. She was the first British contemporary painter, and the first woman, to be awarded the prestigious International Prize for painting. In many works since this period, Riley has employed others to paint the pieces, while she concentrates on the actual design of her work.

Life and work

Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark September 13, 1928, in New Castle, Indiana. His family relocated to Indianapolis, where he graduated from Arsenal Technical High School. He moved to New York City in 1954 and joined the pop art movement, using distinctive imagery drawing on commercial art approaches blended with existentialism, that gradually moved toward what Indiana calls “sculptural poems”.

In 1962, Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery hosted Robert Indiana’s first New York solo exhibition. He has since enjoyed solo exhibitions at over 30 museums and galleries worldwide. Indiana’s works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Brandeis Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts; Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the Los Angeles County Museum, California, among many others.^[1]

Indiana’s work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like EAT, HUG, and, his best known example, LOVE.

Indiana’s iconic work LOVE was first created for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and later was included on an eight-cent United States Postal Service postage stamp in 1973, the first of their regular series of “love stamps.” The first serigraph/silk screen of “Love” was printed as part of an exhibition poster for Stable Gallery in 1966 (See “Love and The American Dream: The Art of Robert Indiana”, page 87). A few examples of the rare image, in bold blue and green with a red bottom announcing “Stable May 66″ are known to exist. 25 of these, without the red announcement, were signed and dated on the reverse by Indiana. Sculptural versions of the image have been installed at numerous American and international locations.

In 1995, Indiana created a ‘Heliotherapy Love’ series of 300 silk screen prints signed and numbered by the artist, which surrounds the iconic love image in a bright yellow border. These prints are the largest official printed version of the Love image.

In 2008, Indiana created an image similar to his iconic LOVE (letters stacked two to a line, the letter “o” tilted on its side), but this time showcasing the word “HOPE,” and donated all proceeds from the sale of reproductions of his image to Democrat Barack Obama‘s presidential campaign, raising in excess of $1,000,000. A stainless steel sculpture of HOPE was unveiled outside Denver’s Pepsi Center during the 2008 Democratic National Convention. The Obama campaign sold T-shirts, pins, bumper stickers, posters, pins and other items adorned with HOPE. Editions of the sculpture have been released and sold internationally and the artist himself has called HOPE “Love’s close relative”.

For Valentine’s Day 2011 Indiana created a similar variation on LOVE for Google, which was displayed in place of the search engine site’s normal logo.

Other well-known works by Indiana include: his painting the unique basketball court formerly used by the Milwaukee Bucks in that city’s U.S. Cellular Arena, with a large M shape taking up each half of the court; his sculpture in the lobby of Taipei 101, called 1-0 (2002, aluminum), using multicoloured numbers to suggest the conduct of world trade and the patterns of human life; and the works he created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks and exhibited in New York in 2004 called the Peace Paintings.

Indiana has lived as a resident in the island town of Vinalhaven, Maine since 1978. Indiana has been a theatrical set and costume designer, such as the 1976 production by the Santa Fe Opera of Virgil Thomson‘s The Mother of Us All, based on the life of suffragist Susan B. Anthony. He was the star of Andy Warhol‘s film Eat (1964), which is a 45-minute film of Indiana eating a mushroom in his SoHo loft.

LOVE

Indiana’s best known image is the word love in upper-case letters, arranged in a square with a tilted letter O. The iconography first appeared in a series of poems originally written in 1958, in which Indiana stacked LO and VE on top of one another. Then in a painting with the words “Love is God”. The red/green/blue image was then created for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964. It was put on an eight-cent US Postal Service postage stamp in 1973, the first of their regular series of “love stamps.”

Damien Hirst

Damien Steven Hirst (born 7 June 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s.He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly Britain’s richest living artist, with his wealth valued at £215m in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.

Death is a central theme in Hirst’s works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine (clear display case) became the iconic work of British art in the 1990s,^[10] and the symbol of Britart worldwide.He has also made “spin paintings,” created on a spinning circular surface, and “spot paintings”, which are rows of randomly coloured circles created by his assistants.

In September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and by-passing his long-standing galleries. ,The auction exceeded all predictions, raising £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst’s own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde.

In several instances since 1999, sources for certain of Hirst’s works have been challenged and contested as plagiarised, both in written articles by journalists and artists, and, in one instance, through legal proceedings which led to an out-of-court settlement.

Hirst has made certain controversial statements to the media including, following the September attacks, Hirst congratulated the attackers, stating, “You’ve got to hand it to them on some level.” On 18 September 2002, he “apologised unreservedly” for the remarks.

Early life

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. His father was reportedly a motor mechanic, who left the family when Hirst was 12. His mother, Mary Brennan, of Irish Catholic descent, worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau, and has stated that she lost control of her son when he was young. He was arrested on two occasions for shoplifting.However, Hirst sees her as someone who would not tolerate rebellion: she cut up his bondage trousers and heated one of his Sex Pistols vinyl records on the cooker to turn it into a fruit bowl (or a plant pot). He says, “If she didn’t like how I was dressed, she would quickly take me away from the bus stop.” She did, though, encourage his liking for drawing, which was his only successful educational subject.

His art teacher “pleaded” for Hirst to be allowed to enter the sixth form, where he took two A-levels, achieving an “E” grade in art. He was refused admission to Leeds College of Art and Design, when he first applied, but attended the college after a subsequent successful application.

He worked for two years on London building sites, then studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London^[17] (1986–89), although again he was refused a place the first time he applied. In 2007, Hirst was quoted as saying of An Oak Tree by Goldsmiths’ senior tutor, Michael Craig-Martin: “That piece is, I think, the greatest piece of conceptual sculpture. I still can’t get it out of my head.” While a student, Hirst had a placement at a mortuary, an experience that influenced his later themes and materials.

Warehouse shows

In July 1988, in his second year at Goldsmiths College, Hirst was the main organiser of an independent student exhibition, Freeze, in a disused London Port Authority administrative block in London’s Docklands. He gained sponsorship from theLondon Docklands Development Corporation. The show was visited by Charles Saatchi, Norman Rosenthal and Nicholas Serota, thanks to the influence of his Goldsmiths’ lecturer Michael Craig-Martin. Hirst’s own contribution to the show consisted of a cluster of cardboard boxes painted with household paint. After graduating, Hirst was included in New Contemporaries show and in a group show at Kettles Yard Gallery in Cambridge. Seeking a gallery dealer, he first approached Karsten Schubert, but was turned down.

In 1990 Hirst, along with his friend Carl Freedman and Billee Sellman, curated two enterprising “warehouse” shows, Modern Medicine and Gambler, in a Bermondsey former Peek Freans biscuit factory they designated “Building One”. Saatchi arrived at the second show in a green Rolls Royce and, according to Freedman, stood open-mouthed with astonishment in front of (and then bought) Hirst’s first major “animal” installation, A Thousand Years, consisting of a large glass case containing maggots and flies feeding off a rotting cow’s head. They also staged Michael Landy‘s Market. At this time, Hirst said, “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say ‘f off’. But after a while you can get away with things.”

In 1991 his first solo exhibition, organised by Tamara Chodzko – Dial, In and Out of Love, was held in an unused shop on Woodstock Street in central London; he also had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in Paris. The Serpentine Gallery presented the first survey of the new generation of artists with the exhibition Broken English, in part curated by Hirst. At this time Hirst met the up-and-coming art dealer, Jay Jopling, who then represented him.

Career in contemporary art

In 1991, Charles Saatchi had offered to fund whatever artwork Hirst wanted to make, and the result was showcased in 1992 in the first Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in North London. Hirst’s work was titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and was a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine, and sold for £50,000. The shark had been caught by a commissioned fisherman in Australia and had cost £6,000. It became the iconic work of British art in the 1990s, and the symbol of Britart worldwide. The exhibition also included A Thousand Years. As a result of the show, Hirst was nominated for that year’s Turner Prize, but it was awarded to Grenville Davey.

 

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Hirst’s first major international presentation was in the Venice Biennale in 1993 with the work, Mother and Child Divided, a cow and a calf cut into sections and exhibited in a series of separate vitrines. He curated the show Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away in 1994 at the Serpentine Gallery in London, where he exhibited Away from the Flock (a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde). On 9 May, Mark Bridger, a 35 year old artist from Oxford, walked in to the gallery and poured black ink into the tank, and retitled the work Black Sheep. He was subsequently prosecuted, at Hirst’s wish, and was given two years’ probation. The sculpture was restored at a cost of £1,000.

In 1995, Hirst won the Turner Prize. New York public health officials banned Two Fucking and Two Watching featuring a rotting cow and bull, because of fears of “vomiting among the visitors”. There were solo shows in Seoul, London andSalzburg. He directed the video for the song “Country House” for the band Blur. No Sense of Absolute Corruption, his first solo show in the Gagosian Gallery in New York was staged the following year. In London the short film, Hanging Around, was shown—written and directed by Hirst and starring Eddie Izzard. In 1997 the Sensation exhibition opened at the Royal Academy in London. A Thousand Years and other works by Hirst were included, but the main controversy occurred over other artists’ works. It was nevertheless seen as the formal acceptance of the YBAs into the establishment.

In 1997, his autobiography and art book, I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, was published. With Alex James of the band Blur and actor Keith Allen, he formed the band Fat Les, achieving a number 2 hit with a raucous football-themed song Vindaloo, followed up by Jerusalem with the London Gay Men’s Chorus. Hirst also painted a simple colour pattern for the Beagle 2 probe. This pattern was to be used to calibrate the probe’s cameras after it had landed on Mars. He turned down the British Council‘s invitation to be Britain’s representative at the 1999 Venice Biennale because “it didn’t feel right”. He sued British Airways claiming a breach of copyright over an advert design with coloured spots for its low budget airline, Go.

2000′s

In 2000, Hirst’s sculpture Hymn (which Saatchi had bought for a reported £1m) was given pole position at the show Ant Noises (an anagram of “sensation”) in the Saatchi Gallery. Hirst was then sued himself for breach of copyright over this sculpture (see Appropriation below). Hirst sold three more copies of his sculpture for similar amounts to the first. In September 2000, in New York, Larry Gagosian held the Hirst show, Damien Hirst: Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings. 100,000 people visited the show in 12 weeks and all the work was sold.

On 10 September 2002, on the eve of the first anniversary of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, Hirst said in an interview with BBC News Online:

“The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually… You’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing.”

The next week, following public outrage at his remarks, he issued a statement through his company, Science Ltd:

“I apologise unreservedly for any upset I have caused, particularly to the families of the victims of the events on that terrible day.”

Hirst gave up smoking and drinking in 2002, although the short-term result was that his wife Maia “had to move out because I was so horrible.” He had met Joe Strummer (former lead singer of The Clash) at Glastonbury in 1995, becoming good friends and going on annual family holidays with him. Just before Christmas 2002, Strummer died of a heart attack. This had a profound effect on Hirst, who said, “It was the first time I felt mortal.” He subsequently devoted a lot of time to founding a charity, Strummerville, to help young musicians.

In April 2003, the Saatchi Gallery opened at new premises in County Hall, London, with a show that included a Hirst retrospective. This brought a developing strain in his relationship with Saatchi to a head (one source of contention had been who was most responsible for boosting their mutual profile). Hirst disassociated himself from the retrospective to the extent of not including it in his CV. He was angry that a Mini car that he had decorated for charity with his trademark spots was being exhibited as a serious artwork. The show also scuppered a prospective Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern. He said Saatchi was “childish” and “I’m not Charles Saatchi’s barrel-organ monkey … He only recognises art with his wallet … he believes he can affect art values with buying power, and he still believes he can do it.”

In September 2003 he had an exhibition Romance in the Age of Uncertainty at Jay Jopling’s White Cube gallery in London, which made him a reported £11m, bringing his wealth to over £35m. It was reported that a sculpture, Charity, had been sold for £1.5m to a Korean, Kim Chang-Il, who intended to exhibit it in his department store’s gallery in Seoul. The 22-foot (6.7m), 6-ton sculpture was based on the 1960s Spastic Society’s model, which is of a girl in leg irons holding a collecting box. In Hirst’s version the collecting box is shown broken open and is empty.

Charity was exhibited in the centre of Hoxton Square, in front of the White Cube. Inside the gallery downstairs were 12 vitrines representing Jesus’s disciples, each case containing mostly gruesome, often blood-stained, items relevant to the particular disciple. At the end was an empty vitrine, representing Christ. Upstairs were four small glass cases, each containing a cow’s head stuck with scissors and knives. It has been described as an “extraordinarily spiritual experience” in the tradition of Catholic imagery. At this time Hirst bought back 12 works from Saatchi (a third of Saatchi’s holdings of Hirst’s early works), via Jay Jopling, for a total fee reported to exceed £8 million. Hirst had sold these pieces to Saatchi in the early 1990s for a considerably smaller sum, his first installations costing less than £10,000.



Virgin Mother at the 2010 Monaco Exhibition

On 24 May 2004, a fire in the Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including 17 of Hirst’s, although the sculpture Charity survived, as it was outside in the builder’s yard. That July, Hirst said of Saatchi, “I respect Charles. There’s not really a feud. If I see him, we speak, but we were never really drinking buddies.”

In December 2004, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was sold by Saatchi to American collector Steve Cohen, for $12 million (£6.5 million), in a deal negotiated by Hirst’s New York agent, Gagosian. Cohen, a Greenwich hedge fund manager, then donated the work to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Sir Nicholas Serota had wanted to acquire it for the Tate Gallery, and Hugo Swire, Shadow Minister for the Arts, tabled a question to ask if the government would ensure it stayed in the country. Current export regulations do not apply to living artists.

Hirst exhibited 30 paintings at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in March 2005. These had taken 3½ years to complete. They were closely based on photos, mostly by assistants (who were rotated between paintings) but with a final finish by Hirst.

In February 2006, he opened a major show in Mexico, at the Hilario Galguera Gallery, called The Death of God, Towards a Better Understanding of Life without God aboard The Ship of Fools. The exhibition attracted considerable media coverage as Hirst’s first show in Latin America. In June that year, he exhibited alongside the work of Francis Bacon (Triptychs) at the Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London. Included in the exhibition was the seminal vitrine, A Thousand Years (1990), and four triptychs: paintings, medicine cabinets and a new formaldehyde work entitled The Tranquility of Solitude (For George Dyer), influenced by Bacon.

Lullaby Spring

Hirst gained the auction record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist—his Lullaby Spring in June 2007, when a 3 metre-wide steel cabinet with 6,136 pills sold for 19.2 million dollars to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir ofQatar.

For the Love of God (2007)

In June 2007, Beyond Belief, an exhibition of Hirst’s new work, opened at the White Cube gallery in London. The centre-piece, a Memento Mori titled For the Love of God, was a human skull recreated in platinum and adorned with 8,601 diamonds weighing a total of 1,106.18 carats. Approximately £15,000,000 worth of diamonds were used. It was modelled on an 18th century skull, but the only surviving human part of the original is the teeth. The asking price for For the Love of God was £50,000,000 ($100 million or 75 million euros). It didn’t sell outright, and on 30 August 2008 was sold to a consortium that included Hirst himself and his gallery White Cube.

In November 2008, the skull was exhibited at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam next to an exhibition of paintings from the museum collection selected by Hirst. Wim Pijbes, the museum director, said of the exhibition, “It boosts our image. Of course, we do the Old Masters but we are not a ‘yesterday institution’. It’s for now. And Damien Hirst shows this in a very strong way.”

Beautiful Inside My Head Forever

Beautiful Inside My Head Forever was a two day auction of Hirst’s new work at Sotheby’s, London, taking place on 15 and 16 September 2008. It was unusual as he bypassed galleries and sold directly to the public. Writing in The Independent, Cahal Milmo said that the idea of the auction was conceived by Hirst’s business advisor of 13 years, Frank Dunphy, who had to overcome Hirst’s initial reluctance about the idea.

The sale raised £111 million ($198 million) for 218 items. The auction exceeded expectations,and was ten times higher than the existing Sotheby’s record for a single artist sale, occurring as the financial markets plunged. The Sunday Times said that Hirst’s business colleagues had “propped up” the sale prices, making purchases or bids which totalled over half of the £70.5 million spent on the first sale day: Harry Blain of the Haunch of Venison gallery said that bids were entered on behalf of clients wishing to acquire the work.

Personal life

Hirst lives with his Californian girlfriend, Maia Norman, by whom he has three sons: Connor Ojala, (born 1995, Kensington and Chelsea, London), Cassius Atticus (born 2000, North Devon) and Cyrus Joe (born 2005, Westminster, London).Since the birth of Connor, he has spent most of his time at his remote farmhouse, a 300 year old former inn, near Combe Martin, Devon. Hirst and Norman are not married,although Hirst refers to Norman as his “common-law wife”. The artist owns a large compound in Baja, Mexico which serves as a part-time residence and art studio. The studio employs several artists that carry out Hirst’s projects.

Hirst has admitted serious drug and alcohol problems during a ten year period from the early 1990s: “I started taking cocaine and drink… I turned into a babbling fucking wreck.” During this time he was renowned for his wild behaviour and eccentric acts, including for example, putting a cigarette in the end of his penis in front of journalists. He frequented the high profile Groucho Club in Soho, London, and was banned on occasion for his behaviour.

Net worth

Hirst is reputed to be the richest living artist to date. In 2009, the annually collated chart of the wealthiest individuals in Britain and Ireland, Sunday Times Rich List, placed Hirst at joint number 238 with a net worth of £235m. Hirst’s wealth was valued at £215m in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List, hence Damien Hirst is Britain’s wealthiest artist.

In September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and by-passing his long-standing galleries.The auction exceeded all predictions, raising £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst’s own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde.^[13]

In several instances since 1999, the sources for certain of Hirst’s works have been challenged and contested, both in written articles by journalists and artists, and, in one instance, through legal proceedings which led to an out-of-court settlement.^[82]

MARKET ANALYSIS UPDATED 2011

Lullaby Spring

Current Auction Record:

Lullaby Spring

stainless steel and glass cabinet with painted cast pills 2002

Height 72 in.; Width 108 in.; Depth 4 in.

Sotheby’s London: Thursday, June 21, 2007 [Lot 00036]
Contemporary Evening Sale

£9,652,000 GBP

The big prices for Hirst were achieved mostly around 2008 particularly at the Beautiful Forever sale, where the prices achieved account for almost all the top one hundred sale results. This sale was perfectly timed to capitalise on the hype surrounding the artist and there is a strong sense now that this does not reflect the true values.

Since that sale when many lots sold into the millions of dollars, there has been little at auction at least, to support the structure and it would seem that many owners are holding back the consignment of Hirst’s works in the hope of a recovery. This is complicated by the lack of detail about the true levels of production and nervousness about the stock held by Hirst’s dealers.

The market has consolidated to some degree however and demand is strong when prices are realistic.

Quinn’s oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual. Using an broad array of materials, from ice and blood to glass, marble or lead, Quinn develops these paradoxes into experimental, conceptual works that are often figurative in form.

Life and career

Quinn was born in London in 1964. He studied history and the history of art at Robinson College, Cambridge. He worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barry Flanagan and began to exhibit in the early 1990s. He was the first artist represented by Jay Jopling, and was exhibited in Charles Saatchi’s Sensation.

Quinn’s sculpture, paintings and drawings often deal with the distanced relationship we have with our bodies, highlighting how the conflict between the ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ has a grip on the contemporary psyche. In 1999, Quinn began a series of marble sculptures of amputees as a way of re-reading the aspirations of Greek and Roman statuary and their depictions of an idealised whole.

One such work depicted Alison Lapper, a woman who was born without arms, when she was heavily pregnant. Quinn subsequently enlarged this work to make it a major piece of public art for the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square. Other key themes in his work include genetic modification and hybridism. Garden (2000), for instance, is a walk-through installation of impossibly beautiful flowers that will never decay, or his ‘Eternal Spring’ sculptures, featuring flowers preserved in perfect bloom by being plunged into sub-zero silicone. Quinn has also explored the potential artistic uses of DNA, making a portrait of a sitter by extracting strands of DNA and placing it in a test-tube. DNA Garden (2001), contains the DNA of over 75 plant species as well as 2 humans: a re-enactment of the Garden of Eden on a cellular level. Quinn’s diverse and poetic work meditates on our attempts to understand or overcome the transience of human life through scientific knowledge and artistic expression.

Works

Quinn’s self portrait “Self” is a signature piece. A frozen sculpture of the artist’s head made from 4.5 litres of his own blood, taken from his body over a period of 5 months. This he first did in his late 20s in 1991 continues to do it every 5 years. In interview in 2000, reflecting on the iconic artwork, he remarked, “Well, I think it’s a great sculpture. I’m really happy with it. I think it is inevitable that you have one piece people focus in on. But that’s really good because it gets people into the work.”

Described by Quinn as a ‘frozen moment on life-support’, the work is carefully maintained in a refrigeration unit, reminding the viewer of the fragility of existence. The artist makes a new version of Self every five years, each of which documents Quinn’s own physical transformation and deterioration. Self, like many other pieces by the YBAs, was bought by Charles Saatchi (in 1991 for a reputed £13,000) the piece was exhibited by Saatchi when he opened his new gallery in London in 2003. In April, 2005, Self was reputedly sold to a US collector for £1.5m. The National Portrait Gallery in London acquired Self 2006. (Purchased through The Art Fund, the Henry Moore Foundation, Terry and Jean de Gunzburg and Project B Contemporary Art, 2009)

Alison Lapper, The Fourth Plinth (2005-2007)

“Alison Lapper” Trafalgar Square, 2005-2007

Quinn has made a series of marble sculptures of people either born with limbs missing or who have had them amputated. This culminated in his 15 ton marble statue of Alison Lapper, a woman born with no arms and severely shortened legs, which was displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London from September 2005 until October 2007. (The Fourth Plinth is used for rotating displays of sculpture.) In Disability Studies Quarterly, Ann Millett writes in the abstract of her research article, “The work has been highly criticized for capitalizing on the shock value of disability, as well as lauded for its progressive social values. Alison Lapper Pregnant and the controversy surrounding it showcase disability issues at the forefront of current debates in contemporary art.”

Quinn is quoted as saying

At first glance it would seem that there are few if any public sculptures of people with disabilities. However, a closer look reveals that Trafalgar Square is one of the few public spaces where one exists: Nelson on top of his column has lost an arm. I think that Alison’s portrait reactivates this dormant aspect of Trafalgar Square. Most public sculpture, especially in the Trafalgar Square and Whitehall areas, is triumphant male statuary. Nelson’s Column is the epitome of a phallic male monument and I felt that the square needed some femininity, linking with Boudicca near the Houses of Parliament. Alison’s statue could represent a new model of female heroism. (Marc Quinn 2005)

In August 2008, Quinn unveiled another sculpture of Kate Moss, this time in solid 18 carat gold, called Siren, which was exhibited in the British Museum, London. The life size sculpture was promoted as “the largest gold statue since ancient Egypt”Siren was identified as using a similar strategy as Damien Hirst’s diamond skull with its expensive use of material which could be dismantled if necessary, or in this case melted down, with the artworks as material investment plus added-value artist branding. It was also identified as containing several elements, including the celebrity subject matter and sensation-inducing pose, which accelerate media coverage.

In May 2010, Quinn revealed a series of new sculptures at Londons White Cube gallery including The Ecstatic Autogenesis of Pamela based on film actress Pamela Anderson and Chelsea Charms based on pornography model Chelsea Charms.

Quinn has always been interested in the public’s obsession with the body, its perfections and flaws, and how this obsession has led some people to alter their bodies in increasingly extreme ways.

Quinn’s new sculptures, as Joachim Pissarro has noted in his catalogue essay to accompany the exhibition, are portraits of people who ‘exemplify a disconnect between body and soul’ and who ‘open up a provocative new chapter in [Quinn's] exploration of the relationship between corporeality and spirituality – fundamentally addressing the notion of identity by asking: is one more or less one’s self after cosmetic surgery?’

Quinn’s new models include ‘Catman’ (Dennis Avner, who has been tattooed to look like a cat) and ‘the pregnant man’ (Thomas Beatie) to niche porn stars such as Buck Angel, a ‘man with a pussy’, and Allanah Starr, a transsexual woman who has changed her body into the idealisation of femininity even though she also has a penis.

Quinn has also made sculptures of celebrities. Pamela Anderson is depicted in polished bronze, doubled at the shoulder with an identical alter ego, as if part of a conjoined twin, her face staring at the ceiling in a state of ecstasy. Two large heads of Michael Jackson are carved out of black, white and red marble. The two sculptures work in dialectical opposition – depicting Jackson as he is most well known after numerous surgical interventions, one with a black face, the other white.

In the Night Garden – Sarasvati Night Bloom

Market Analysis

In May 2011, Sotheby’s New York sold ‘Myth (Venus)’ a painted bronze sculpture by Quinn  from 2006, 120 x 90 x 79 in. (305 x 228 x 200 cm.) The sculpture, number two from an edition of three sold for $1.2m USD, a record at auction for the artist. Other auction highs have been for sculptures of the same theme. As mentioned above, the frozen head ‘Self’ was reputedly sold in 2005 by Charles Saatchi for $2.4m USD equivalent.

The auction record for a painting on canvas was also set in 2011 at Sotheby’s London for a large, 98 x 66 inch painting ‘Snow Hall Creek’ which fetched a little over $400,000 USD. This is at the higher end of a more usual auction range for works by Quinn of this size which is around $100-300,000 USD.  Smaller scale paintings and sculptures are at proportionately lower levels.

Signed limited edition prints by Quinn in sets and individually and in auction, are usually in the region of $1000 – $3000 per image.

Please contact us for a full assessment of the market for works by Marc Quinn and the possibility for either sale or acquisition.

Gehard Richter

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, Saxony in 1932, and grew up in Reichenau, Lower Silesia, and in Waltersdorf (Zittauer Gebirge) in the Upper Lusatiancountryside. He left school after tenth grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Art Academy. In 1948 he terminated the higher professional school in Zittau, and, between 1949 and 1951, was trained there in writing as well as in stage and advertising painting. In 1950 his application for membership in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (Dresden University of Visual Arts, founded in 1764) was rejected. He finally began his study at the Dresden Academy of Arts in 1951. His teachers were Karl von Appen, Ulrich Lohmar and Will Grohmann. In these early days of his career he prepared a wall painting (“Communion with Picasso”, 1955) for the refectory of this Academy of Arts as part of his B.A. A further mural followed within the Hygiene-Museum (German Hygiene Museum) with the title („Lebensfreude“, which means “Joy of life”) for his diploma.

Both paintings had been painted over for ideological reasons after Richter escaped from East to West Germany (two months before the building of the Berlin wall); after unification of both German states, the wall painting Joy of life (1956) was uncovered in two places in the stairway of the German Hygiene Museum, and after the millennium these two uncovered windows with a look at the Joy of Life had been newly recovered. From 1957 to 1961 Richter worked as a master trainee in the academy and took orders for the former state of the GDR. During this time he worked intensively at murals (Arbeiterkampf, which means Worker fight), on paintings in oil (f.e. portraits of the well known East-German actress Angelica Domroese and of Richter’s first wife Ema), on various self portraits and furthermore on a panorama of Dresden with the neutral name Stadtbild (Townscape, 1956).

When he arrived in West Germany, Richter began to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz together with Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg and Gotthard Graubner. With Polke and Lueg he introduced the term Kapitalistischer Realismus (Capitalistic Realism) as an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial shorthand of advertising. This title also referred to the realist style of art known as Socialist Realism, then the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union, but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art doctrine of western capitalism. Later, Lueg founded the gallery Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf.

Richter taught as a visiting professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, in Hamburg, and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and returned in 1971 to Düsseldorf Art Academy as a professor for over 15 years.

In 1983, Richter resettled from Düsseldorf to Cologne, where he still lives and works today.

Richter married Marianne Eufinger in 1957. Nine years later, she gave birth to his first daughter, Betty. He married his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken, in 1982. Richter had his son, Moritz, with his third wife, Sabine Moritz, the year they were married, 1995. One year later, his second daughter, Ella Maria, was born.

In 2005 Richter, in an interview by the German political magazine Spiegel, wondered why citizens of Salzburg did not protest a sculpture by Markus Lüpertz, and described the work as expressing the deprivation of public art sponsorship in Germany. The sculpture, an homage to Mozart, was promptly attacked by a right-wing art activist from Austria and badly damaged.

Photo-paintings

Richter created various painting pictures from black-and-white photographs during the 1960s and early 1970s, basing them on a variety of sources: from newspapers and books, sometimes incorporating their captions, as in Helga Matura (1966); private snapshots; aerial views of towns and mountains, for example Cityscape Madrid (1968) and Alps (1968); seascapes (1969–70); and a large multi-partite work made for the German Pavilion in the 1972 Venice Biennale, Forty-eight Portraits (1971–2), for which he chose mainly the faces of composers such as Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius, and of writers such as H. G. Wells and Franz Kafka.

Cathedral Square, Milan 1968 275 cm X 290 cm Oil on canvas

Apple Trees 1987 67 cm X 92 cm Oil on canvas

Many of these paintings are made in a multi-step process of representations. He starts with a photograph, which he has found or taken himself, and projects it onto his canvas, where he traces it for exact form. Taking his color palette from the photograph, he paints to replicate the look of the original picture. His hallmark “blur”—sometimes a softening by the light touch of a soft brush, sometimes a hard smear by an aggressive pull with his squeegee—has two effects: 1. It offers the image a photographic appearance; and 2. Paradoxically, it testifies the painter’s actions, both skilled and coarse, and the plastic nature of the paint itself.

In some paintings blurs and smudges are severe enough to disrupt the image; it becomes hard to understand or believe. The subject is nullified. In these paintings, images and symbols (such as landscapes, portraits, and news photos) are rendered fragile illusions, fleeting conceptions in our constant reshaping of the world.

Richter has stated that the use of photographic imagery as a starting point for his early paintings resulted from an attempt to escape the complicated process of deciding what to paint, along with the critical and theoretical implications accompanying such decisions within the context of a modernist discourse. To achieve this, Richter began amassing photos from magazines, books, etc, many of which became the subject matter of his early photography-based paintings. Thus the Atlas was born: Atlas is an ongoing, encyclopedic work composed of approximately 4,000 photographs, reproductions or cut-out details of photographs and illustrations, grouped together on approximately 600 separate panels.^[6] When Atlas was first exhibited in 1972 at the Museum for Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht under the title “Atlas der Fotos und Skizzen,” it included 315 parts. The work has continued to expand, and was exhibited later in full form at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1989, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1990, and at Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1995.

Gilbert & George 1975 80 cm X 100 cm Oil on canvas

From around 1964 Richter made a number of portraits of dealers, collectors, artists and others connected with his immediate professional circle. From 1966, as well as photographs given to him by others, Richter began using photographs he had taken as the basis for portraits. In 1975, on the occasion of a show in Düsseldorf, Gilbert and George commissioned Richter to make a portrait of them.

Richter began making prints in 1965 and has completed more than one hundred to date; he was most active before 1974, completing projects only sporadically since that time. He has explored a variety of photographic printmaking processes — screenprint, photolithography, andcollotype — in search of inexpensive mediums that would lend a “non-art” appearance to his work.

In 1982 and 1983, Richter made a series of paintings of Candles and Skulls that relate to a longstanding tradition of still life memento-mori painting. The Candle paintings coincided with his first large-scale abstract paintings, and represent the complete antithesis to those vast, colorful and playfully meaningless works.

In a 1988 series of fifteen ambiguous photo paintings entitled Baader-Meinhof (October 18, 1977) he depicted four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German left-wing terrorist organization. These paintings were created from black-and-white newspaper and police photos. Three RAF members were found dead in their prison cells on October 18, 1977, and the cause of their deaths was the focus of widespread controversy.

Untitled 1998 14.7 cm x 10 cm Oil on photograph

Since 1989, Richter has worked on creating new images by dragging photographs over wet paint. The photographs, not all taken by Richter himself, are mostly snapshots of daily life: family vacations, pictures of friends, mountains, buildings and streetscapes.

In May 2002, Richter photographed 216 details of his abstract painting no. 648-2, from 1987. Working on a long table over a period of several weeks, Richter combined these 10 x 15 cm details with 165 texts on the Iraq war, published in the German FAZ newspaper on March 20 and 21. This work was published in 2004 as a book entitled War Cut.

Abstract work

In 1969 Richter produced the first of a group of grey monochromes that consist exclusively of the textures resulting from different methods of paint application. As early as 1966 he had made paintings based on colour charts, using the rectangles of colour as found objects in an apparently limitless variety of hue; these culminated in 1973–4 in a series of large-format pictures such as 256 Colours.

In 1976, Richter first gave the title Abstract Painting to one of his works. By presenting a painting without even a few words to name and explain it, he felt he was “letting a thing come, rather than creating it.” In his abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of nonrepresentational painting. The paintings evolve in stages, based on his responses to the picture’s progress: the incidental details and patterns that emerge. Throughout his process, Richter uses the same techniques he uses in his representational paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers. From the mid 1980s, Richter began to use a home-made squeegee to rub and scrape the paint that he had applied in large bands across his canvases. In the 1990s the artist began to run his squeegee up and down the canvas in an ordered fashion to produce vertical columns that take on the look of a wall of planks.

Studio 1985 260 cm X 600 cm Oil on canvas

Richter’s abstract work is remarkable for the illusion of space that develops, ironically, out of his incidental process: an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving, and subtracting paint. Despite unnatural palettes, spaceless sheets of color, and obvious trails of the artist’s tools, the abstract pictures often act like windows through which we see the landscape outside. As in his representational paintings, there is an equalization of illusion and paint. In those paintings, he reduces worldly images to mere incidents of Art. Similarly, in his abstract pictures, Richter exalts spontaneous, intuitive mark-making to a level of spatial logic and believability.

Isa 1980 60 cm X 85 cm Oil on woo

Firenze continues a cycle of 99 works conceived in the autumn of 1999 and executed in the same year and thereafter. The series of overpainted photographs, or übermalte Photographien, consists of small paintings bearing images of the city of Florence, created by the artist as a tribute to the music of Steve Reich and the work of Contempoartensemble, a Florence-based group of musicians.

In 2006, Richter conceived six paintings as a coherent group under the title Cage, named after the American avant-garde composer John Cage.

Exhibitions

Richter first began exhibiting in Düsseldorf in 1963. Richter had his first gallery solo show in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Soon after, he had exhibitions in Munich and Berlin and by the early 1970s exhibited frequently throughout Europe and the United States. In 1966, Bruno Bischofberger was the first to show the Richter’s works outside Germany. Richter’s first retrospective took place at the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1976 and covered works from 1962 to 1974. A traveling retrospective at Düsseldorf’s Kunsthalle in 1986 was followed in 1991 by a retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London.

Richter became known to a U.S. audience in 1990, when the St. Louis Art Museum circulated Baader-Meinhof (October 18, 1977), a show that that was later seen at the Lannan Foundation in Marina del Rey, California. Richter’s first North American retrospective was in 1998 at the Art Gallery of Ontario and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2002, a 40-year retrospective of Richter’s work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. He has participated in several international art shows, including the Venice Biennale (1972, 1980, 1984, 1997 and 2007), as well as Documenta V (1972), VII (1982), VIII (1987), IX (1992), and X (1997).

The Gerhard Richter Archive was established in cooperation with the artist in 2005 as an institute of the State Art Collections in Dresden, Germany (www.gerhard-richter-archiv.de).

Solo exhibitions (selection)

• ‘Gerhard Richter 4900 Colours: Version II’ at the Serpentine Gallery, London, United Kingdom. 2008
• ‘Gerhard Richter Portraits’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London, United Kingdom. 2009

Recognition

Although Richter gained popularity and critical praise throughout his career, his fame burgeoned during his 2005 retrospective exhibition, which declared his place among the most important artists of the 20th century. Today, many call Gerhard Richter the best living painter. In part, this comes from his ability to explore the medium at a time when many were heralding its death. Richter has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo, (1997); Wolf Prize, Jerusalem (1994–1995); the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna (1985); and Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel, Germany (1981). He was made an honorary citizen of Cologne in April 2007.

Market Analysis

In February 2008, Christie’s set a first record for Richter’s work by selling the painting Zwei Liebespaare (1966) for £7,300,500 ($14,3 million) to an American collector. That same month, Sotheby’s sold Kerze (1983) for £7,972,500 ($15 million) in London. In 2010, the Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst in Bremen, Germany, decided to sell Richter’s 1966 painting Matrosen (Sailors) in a November auction held by Sotheby’s, where it brought $13 million.

Kerze 1983 95 cm X 90 cm Oil on canvas

At Pierre Bergé & Associés in July 2009, Richter’s 1979 oil painting Abstraktes Bild exceeded its high estimate, selling for €95,000 ($136,021). Richter’s Abstraktes Bild, of 1990 was made the top price of 7.2 million pounds, or about $11.6 million, at a Sotheby’s sale in February 2011 to a bidder who was said by dealers to be an agent for the New York dealer Larry Gagosian.

In 2011, an abstract graphite from the collection of Dennis Hopper surged past it high estimate of $8,000 to fetch $32,500.

The enormous depth in Richter’s oeuvre has meant that his prices were not susceptible to the adjustments that many contemporary artists experienced in the post boom period and recent prices for the best works have come close to the auction records. It would be fair to say that an important painting, either abstract or realist by Richter is in the $2m-5m USD range with the truly major works making more than $10m.

He initially began exhibiting as part of New British Sculpture art scene. He went on to exhibit internationally at venues such as the Tate Gallery and Hayward Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Basel, Haus der Kunst Munich, Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Reina Sofia in Madrid, MAK Vienna, and the ICA Boston. He represented Britain in the XLIV Venice Biennale

in 1990, when he was awarded the Premio Duemila Prize. In 1991 he received the Turner Prize. Notable public sculptures include Cloud Gate, Millennium Park, Chicago, and Sky Mirror at the Rockefeller Center, New York.

Anish Kapoor is a Royal Academician and was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2003. He is also a Distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association.

Early life

Kapoor was raised in an Indian home. His mother was a Jewish immigrant from Baghdad. “My mother was then only a few months old. She had an Indian-Jewish upbringing. Her father, my grandfather, was the cantor in the synagogue inPune. At the time, the Jewish community in Mumbai was quite large, mostly consisting of Baghdadi Jews.” His father, from a Punjabi family, was a hydrographer in the Indian Navy.

Kapoor spent his early years in India, first in Mumbai, and then in Dehra Dun at the Doon School. During 1971-1973, he went to Israel with one of his two brothers. He first stayed in a kibbutz, and then studied electrical engineering. He then left for Britain where he attended Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art and Design.

He achieved widespread recognition when he represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale.

Works

Kapoor’s pieces are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured. His early pieces rely on powder pigment to cover the works and the floor around them. Such use of pigment characterised his first high profile exhibit as part of the New Sculpture exhibition at the Hayward Gallery London in 1978. This practice was inspired by the mounds of brightly coloured pigment in the markets and temples of India.[citation needed] His later works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which have carved apertures and cavities, often alluding to, and playing with, dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, male-female and body-mind). His most recent works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and surroundings. The use of red wax is also part of his current repertoire, evocative of flesh, blood and transfiguration.

Kapoor has produced a number of large works, including Taratantara (1999), a 35 metre-tall piece installed in the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England before renovation began there and Marsyas (2002), a large work of steel and flesh-coloured PVC that reached end to end of the 3,400-square-foot (320 m2) Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. A stone arch by Kapoor is permanently placed at the shore of a lake in Lødingen in northern Norway. In 2000, one of Kapoor’s works, Parabolic Waters, consisting of rapidly rotating coloured water, was shown outside the Millennium Dome in London. In 2001, Sky Mirror, a large mirror piece that reflects the sky and surroundings, was commissioned for a site outside the Nottingham Playhouse. Since 2006, Cloud Gate, a 110-ton stainless steel sculpture with a mirror finish, has been permanently installed in Millennium Park in Chicago. Viewers are able to walk beneath the sculpture and look up into an omphalos or navel above them. In the autumn of 2006, a second Sky Mirror, was installed in Rockefeller Center, New York. Soon to be completed are a memorial to the British victims of 9/11 in New York, and the design and construction of two subway stations in Naples. Kapoor has also been commissioned to produce five pieces of public art by Tees Valley Regeneration (TVR) collectively known as the “Tees Valley Giants”

A Thousand Names

In 2007, he showed Svayambh (which can be roughly translated as ‘self-generated’), a 1.5 metre carved block of red wax that moved on rails through the Nantes Musée des Beaux-Arts as part of the Biennale estuaire; this piece was shown again in a major show at the Haus Der Kunst in Munich and in 2009 at the Royal Academy in London. Kapoor’s recent work increasingly blurs the boundaries between architecture and art.

In 2008, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston exhibited Kapoor’s first U.S. mid-career survey.[12] In the same year, Kapoor created the sculpture “Memory” in Berlin and New York for theGuggenheim Foundation.

Untitled Carved Alabaster 1999

 

In 2009 Anish Kapoor became the first Guest Artistic Director of Brighton Festival. As well as informing the content of the festival as a whole, Kapoor installed 4 significant sculptures for the duration of the festival; Sky Mirror at Brighton Pavilion gardens, C-Curve at The Chattri, Blood Relations (a collaboration with author Salman Rushdie) and 1000 Names, both at Fabrica. He also created 2 new works: a large site-specific work entitled ‘The Dismemberment of Jeanne d’Arc’ and a performance based installation entitled ‘Imagined Monochrome’. The public response was so overwhelming that police had to re-divert traffic around C Curve at the Chattri and exercise crowd control.

In 2009, Anish Kapoor, Carsten Höller and Giuseppe Penone were asked to create three “permanent, site-specific works in harmony with the light and colors” of Pollino National Park, the largest national park in Italy, as the first edition of project ArtePollino – Another South. Kapoor’s work, Cinema di Terra (Earth Cinema), in the thermally active spa area of Latronico, is a 45m long, 3m wide and 7m deep cut into the landscape made from concrete and earth. People can enter from both sides and walk along it until they reach a small square from where they can see the landscape from within.Cinema di Terra officially opened to public in September 2009.

In 2010 a new Anish Kapoor sculpture called “Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem” was commissioned and installed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The sculpture is described as a “16-foot tall polished-steel hourglass” and it “reflects and reverses the Jerusalem sky and the museum’s landscape, a likely reference to the city’s duality of celestial and earthly, holy and profane.”

Kapoor also designed the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a 115 metre spiral sculpture of the Olympic rings. Planned to be built in time for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the piece will be the largest example of public art in the UK when completed.

In November 2010, Kapoor retrospective exhibitions were held at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi and Mumbai’s Mehboob Studio, the first showcase of his work in the country of his birth.

When asked if engagement with people and places is the key to successful public art, Kapoor said,

“ I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects. ”

His work is collected worldwide, notably by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the De Pont Foundation in Tilburg, Netherlands, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.

Kapoor’s gallery representations include the Lisson Gallery, London and the Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Awards

Kapoor represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, 1990, where he was awarded the Premio Duemila. The following year, he won the prestigious Turner Prize.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been held in the Tate, Royal Academy and Hayward Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland, Reina Sofia in Madrid, the National Gallery in Ottawa, Musee des arts contemporains (Grand-Hornu) in Belgium, the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux, the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Brazil, and the Guggenheim in Bilbao and New York. His work is collected worldwide, notably by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Guggenheim inBilbao, the De Pont Foundation in the Netherlands and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.

Market Analysis

Record at Auction

Untitled (cowboy), 1989 Ektacolor photograph 127 x 178 cm

Starting in 1977, Prince photographed four photographs which previously appeared in the New York Times. This process of re-photographing continued into 1983, when his work Spiritual America featured Garry Gross’s photo of Brooke Shields at the age of ten, standing in a bathtub, as an allusion to precocious sexuality and to the Alfred Stieglitz photograph by the same name. His Jokes series (beginning 1986) concerns the sexual fantasies and sexual frustrations ofmiddle-class America, using stand-up comedy and burlesque humor.

After living in New York City for 25 years, Prince moved to upstate New York. His mini-museum, Second House, purchased by the Guggenheim Museum, was struck by lightning and burned down shortly after the museum purchased the House (which Richard had created for himself), having only stood for six years, from 2001 to 2007. Prince now lives and works in New York City.

Richard Prince was born on August 6, 1949, in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, now part of the Republic of Panama. During an interview in 2000 with Julie L. Belcove, he responded to the question of why his parents were in the Zone, by saying “they worked for the government.” When asked further if his father was involved in the military, Prince responded, “No, he just worked for the government.” Prince later lived in the New England city of Braintree, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.

Career

He was first interested in the art of the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. “I was very attracted to the idea of someone who was by themselves, fairly antisocial, kind of a loner, someone who was noncollaborative.” Prince grew up during the height of Pollock’s career, making his work accessible. The 1956 Time magazine article dubbing Pollock “Jack the Dripper” made the thought of pursuing art as career possible. After finishing high school in 1967, Prince set off for Europe at age 18.

He returned home and attended Nasson College in Maine. He describes his school as without grades or real structure. From Maine he was drawn to New York City. Prince has said that his attraction to New York was instigated by the famous photograph of Franz Kline gazing out the window of his 14th Street studio. Prince described the picture as “a man content to be alone, pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of his studio.”

Prince’s first solo exhibition took place in June 1980 during a residency at the CEPA gallery in Buffalo, New York.^[4] His short book Menthol Pictures was published as part of the residency.

In late 2007, Prince had a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a comprehensive show hung in chronological order along the upward spiraling walls. The show continued onto the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Maria Morris Hamburg, the curator of photography at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, asserted, “He is absolutely essential to what’s going on today, he figured out before anyone else—and in a very precocious manner—how thoroughly pervasive the media is. It’s not just an aspect of our lives, but the dominant aspect of our lives.”

Prince has built up a large collection of Beat books and papers. Prince owns several copies of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, including one inscribed to Kerouac’s mother, one famously read on The Steve Allen Show, the original proof copy of the book and an original galley, as well as the copy owned by Neal Cassady (the Dean Moriarty character in the book), with Cassady’s signature and marginal notes.

Describing his career and methodology in a 2005 New York magazine interview, Prince said, “It’s about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.”

Rephotography

Re-photography uses appropriation as its own focus: artists pull from the works of others and the worlds they depict to create their own work. Appropriation art became popular in the late 1970s. Other appropriation artists such as Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Vikky Alexander, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Mike Bidlo also became prominent in the East Village in the 1980s.

During the early period of his career, Prince worked in Time magazine’s tear sheets department. At the end of each work day, he would be left with nothing but the torn out advertising images from the eight or so magazines owned by Time-Life.

Prince had very little experience with photography, but he has said in interviews that all he needed was a subject, the medium would follow, whether it be paint and brush or camera and film. He compared his new method of searching out interesting advertisements to “beachcombing.” His first series during this time focused on models, living room furniture, watches, pens, and jewelry. Pop culture became the focus of his work.

Legal defeat

In December 2008, photographer Patrick Cariou filed suit against Richard Prince, Gagosian Gallery, Lawrence Gagosian and Rizzoli International Publications in Federal district court for copyright infringement in work shown at Prince’s Canal Zone exhibit at the Gagosian gallery. He appropriated 35 photographs made by Cariou. Several of the pieces were barely changed by Prince. Prince also made 28 paintings that included images from Cariou’s Yes Rasta book. The book featured a series of photographs of Rastafarians that Cariou had taken in Jamaica.

On March 18, 2011, US District Judge Deborah A. Batts ruled against Prince, Gagosian Gallery, Inc., and Lawrence Gagosian. The court found that the use by Prince was not fair use (his primary defence), and Cariou’s issue of liability for copyright infringement was granted in its entirety. The court cited much case law including the Rogers v. Koons case of 1992.

Works

Cowboys

Prince’s series known as the Cowboys, produced from 1980 to 1992, and ongoing, is his most famous group of rephotographs. Taken from Marlboro cigarette advertisements of the Marlboro Man, they represent an idealized figure of American masculinity. The Marlboro Man was the iconic equivalent of later brands like Ralph Lauren, which used the polo pony image to identify and associate its brand. “Every week. I’d see one and be like, Oh that’s mine, Thank you,” Prince stated in an interview.

Prince’s Cowboys displayed men in boots and ten-gallon hats, with horses, lassos, spurs and all the fixings that make up the stereotypical image of a cowboy. They were set in the Western U.S., in arid landscapes with stone outcrops flanked by cacti and tumbleweeds, with backdrops of sunsets. The advertisements were staged with the utmost attention to detail.

It has been suggested that his works raise the question of what is real, what is a real cowboy, and what makes it so. Prince’s photographs of these advertisements attempt to prompt one to decide how real are media images.

The subjects of Prince’s rephotographs are the photos of others. He is photographing the works of other photographers, who in the case of the cowboys, had been hired by Marlboro to create images depicting cowboys. Prince described his process in a 2003 interview by Steve Lafreiniere in Artforum. “I had limited technical skills regarding the camera. Actually I had no skills. I played the camera. I used a cheap commercial lab to blow up the pictures. I made editions of two. I never went into a darkroom.”

Gangs

Prince’s rephotographs led to his series known as the Gangs, which followed the same technique of appropriating images from magazines as the Cowboys did, but now the subjects moved from advertisements and mass media toward niches in American society. Prince in this series paid homage to “sex, drugs, and rock’n'roll” in American niches, seen through magazines. He depicted the bizarre in subcultures such as the motorcycle-obsessed, hot rod enthusiasts, surfers, and heavy metal music fans.

Untitled (girlfriend), 1993 Ektacolor photograph Edition of 2 152.4 x 101.6 cm

These Gangs are recognized in his series Girlfriends, featuring biker girls. A motorcycle magazine he used featured photographs of motorcyclists’ girlfriends, were sprawled on their boyfriends’ bikes.

Prince’s Gangs works are single sheets of white paper covered with a grouping or “ganging” of 9×12, 35 mm photographs. Prince did not intend any distinct relationship between the “ganged” photographs. An example can be seen in such works as his 1984 Velvet Beach, twelve Ektacolor-printed photographs of massive waves, clearly from a surf magazine. Another example is his 1986 Live Free or Die, gathering nine images of loosely dressed women on motorcycles.

Prince has said numerous times that he would like to be a biker chick.

Joke paintings

Prince’s first Joke piece came about in 1985, in New York, when he was living in the back room of the 303 Gallery, located on Park Avenue South. His first Joke was about psychiatrists, a subject he later worked with often. Prince described the discovery of the idea for the Jokes beginning when he posted up a small 11 x 14 inch handwritten joke on paper. He realized that if he had walked into a gallery and had seen it hanging from the wall, he would have been envious. Prince’s Jokes come in several forms. His first Jokes were hand written, taken from joke books. His jokes grew into more substantial works as he began to incorporate them with images, often pairing jokes with images that had no relevance with one another, creating an obscure relationship. An example of one of these peculiar combinations can be seen in his 1991 Good Revolution, which depicted black and white images of a male torso in boxing shorts set amongst doodles of a kitchen stove. These were set above the text “Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman that will give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you’re in the wrong home, that’s what it means.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Prince, like his contemporaries Lorna Simpson and Barbara Kruger, played with image and text in a style that was becoming increasingly popular. Prince put jokes among cartoons, often from The New Yorker. Prince described his early discovery of jokes and his sense of humor, as “I never really started telling, I started telling them over. Back in 1985, in Venice, California, I was drawing my favorite cartoons in pencil on paper. After this I dropped the illustration or image part of the cartoon and concentrated on the punch line.”^[11] Prince’s jokes were primarily satirical one-liners, poking fun at topics such as religion, the relationship between husband and wife, his relations with women. The jokes are simple, often relying on a punch line: “I took my wife to a wife-swapping party, I had to throw in some cash” or “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.” Prince commonly repeats his jokes.

The Salesman and the Farmer, 1989 Acrylic, silkscreen, charcoal and marker on canvas 61 x 45.7 cm

Jokes became the complete subject of his prints, set atop monochromatic backgrounds red, orange, blue, yellow, etc. These works range in size from 56 x 48 inches as seen in his 1994 Untitled, to 112 x 203.5 inches, as seen in his 2000 work Nuts. His early jokes were modestly sized, but as they caught on he executed larger pieces. These Monochromatic Jokes question the importance of the unique, in high art. What is it that set these jokes apart from one another, the background color, the color of the text, the jokes themselves? Compared to other Appropriation Artists working in the same time period, Prince has a distinct quality between works and series. Works are distinguishable from one another or identifiable as a particular artist, but with Prince’s Monochromatic Jokes, we are presented with yellow text upon a blue background as in his 1989 Are You Kidding? Differing from Jeff Koons, for example, are not only technique and style, but also the significance given to making the artwork identifiable. In 1988 Koons was working with porcelain sculptures like his Michael Jackson and Bubbles and Pink Panther. These are two works produced in this year that are distinguishable. In the same year, 1988, are Prince’s Fireman and the Drunk and his Untitled (Joke), which raise the serious question of what sets these two works apart.

In a 2000 interview with Julie L. Belcove, Prince called the Joke paintings “what I wanted to become known for.” When asked to identify the artistic genre of his Jokes, Prince responded, “the Joke paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can’t speak English.”

Celebrities

Celebrities is a series that plays with the American obsession with movie stars. Following Warhol’s lead, Prince would search out actors’ headshots, promotional photographs which frequently lack copyright protection. Prince signed them himself, using the actor’s name.

Car Hoods

Car Hoods is a series that works off of the early Gangs series. It featured images from car enthusiast magazines, as well as Prince’s own interest with automobiles. Prince ordered classic vehicle car hoods. He then used the hoods to cast molds, which he washed in different colors.

Check Paintings

The Check Paintings series is like the Celebrities. It was made possible by Prince’s own interest in collecting. Prince began to seek out canceled checks from famous figures in history ranging from Jack Kerouac to Andy Warhol. He put these checks onto paint-covered canvases and often paired them with images of the individual they once belonged to.

Richard Prince Runaway Nurse 2006 Inkjet and acrylic on canvas 203 x 132 cm

Nurse Paintings

The Nurse Paintings are a series inspired by the covers and titles of inexpensive novels that were commonly sold at newspaper stands and delis (pulp romance novels). Prince scanned the covers of the books on his computer and used inkjet printing to transfer the images to canvas, and then personalized the pieces with acryclic paint. They debuted in 2003 at Barbara Gladstone Galleries, who along with Larry Gagosian, represents Prince.^[12] They received mixed responses, not all selling at the asking prices of $50,000 to $60,000. Titles include Surfer Nurse,Naughty Nurse, Millionaire Nurse, and Dude Ranch Nurse, the books from which they were appropriated. Prince said, “The problem with art is, it’s not like the game of golf, where you put the ball in the hole or you don’t put the ball in the hole. There’s no umpire. There’s no judge. There are no rules. It’s one of the problems, but it’s also one of the great things about art: it becomes a question of what lasts.” The Sonic Youth album Sonic Nurse used Nurse paintings, and included a song called “Dude Ranch Nurse”.

Richard Prince used the technique of modern rephotography and some think this series is notable for the technique of layering digital and analog media: the application of an analog medium (acrylic) to a digitized print (ink jet) of a digitized image (scan) of an analog print (book cover) of an analog artwork (original art portrayed on the book cover).

In the series of paintings, the nurses all wear caps and their mouths are covered by surgical masks, although in some of the paintings the red lips bleed through the masks. The final presentations preserve the title and nurse image from each of the book covers, though almost all else is obscured. Titles include A Nurse Involved; Aloha Nurse; Bachelor Nurse; Danger Nurse at Work; Debutant Nurse; and Doctor’s Nurse.

Later works

Prince’s series of paintings from 2007 on appear to be a throwback to more traditional genres of figurative art, and a departure from the pulpy and kitchy content of the Nurse and Jokes series. They are pornographic ink-jet prints overlaid with acrylic paint in a style trying to imitateWillem de Kooning. Prince makes the most direct treatment to the faces, hands and feet, which are bulged and distorted. These works lack the obvious linguistic re-contextualizing of the Jokes series, opting instead for a purely visual idiom.

In 2007, Prince collaborated with the fashion designer Marc Jacobs on his Spring 2008 collection for the French label Louis Vuitton. The collection was inspired in part by Prince’s Nurse Paintings. In an interview for style.com Jacobs stated that after he asked Prince to collaborate with him for Louis Vuitton, Prince started to look to cheap paperbacks that were set in exotic cities “after dark.” As Marc Jacobs put it, “[Prince] asked me, what about Louis Vuitton after dark?”