Untitled (Entertainers)

1983

12 Ektacolor photograph

221 x 45.4 cm (87 x 17 7/8 in.) (each)

The Untitled (Entertainers) series includes 12 photo portraits with a blurred, high-contrast treatment. These brightly lit but elusive faces belong to pictures of Hollywood actors and actresses that Richard Prince clipped out of ads and magazines. This interpretation of fame wavering between light and shadow sheds light on the profound paradoxes of America’s movie industry.

Collecting symbols that have become part of his country’s imagination, Prince captures and ironically highlights the founding myths of the 19th and 20th centuries in America: cowboys, Hollywood pin-ups, bikers and erotic magazine models are the faces of a fantasy-consuming society.

Belonging to his chronicle in the early 1980s about the founding myths of American identity, (Untitled) Entertainers is in the Pinault Collection. It was first exhibited at the "Sequence 1" show at the Palazzo Grassi in 2007.
Exhibitions