Untitled (Fashion)

Richard Prince belongs to a generation of artists who immersed themselves in a culture saturated with commercial images and who, beginning in the 1970s, decided to appropriate their visual language. Prince used advertising images from Time/Life Magazine, identifying their stereotypical codes and then “rephotographing” them. In this process, he eliminated the advertising copy, reframed and enlarged the images, and then ordered them under generic categories. This process of appropriation seeks to decontextualise the images from their commercial function to turn them into artworks and, thus, to redefine the concepts of the image’s authenticity, ownership, and aura.

Between 1982 and 1984, Prince made a series of nine “rephotographs” based on women’s fashion advertisements, titled Fashion. The works explore the representation of women in the male imagination and in American culture. Prince reconstituted the codified “type” of the inaccessible model through repeated close-ups of faces hidden behind accessories such as sunglasses or visors. A saturated purple fog of intense shadows gives the images a dramatically contrastive, sculptural quality. These anonymous models appear as mythological statues onto which the unconscious narratives of American society are projected.

The work was first presented by the Pinault Collection in the exhibition « Forever Sixties » at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes (2023).