Richard Prince Opening at the Walker





Usually the Walker's After Hours/Preview parties are very crowded. Not this time around. The opening for Richard Prince: Spiritual America almost felt empty in comparison to other times, and since I like it crowded and happening, this was not it. Also, we didn't see anyone we knew. On the other hand, it allowed us to spend a longer time in the exhibition (we also saw the concurrent Urban Landscapes exhibition). So after our free Target drinks. We had the mandarin infused vodka tonics. We headed for the exhibition.

The Richard Prince exhibition occupies a number of galleries. Although this exhibition started as a full fledged retrospective of Richard Prince 's work at the Guggenheim in New York, it got somewhat distilled down for the Minneapolis venue. Still, we saw lots of work. The exhibition started with a number of rooms devoted to his earlier photography work, all of which consists of re-photographing pictures from magazines and signs. In a sense it is appropriating images, although he almost never uses the whole image, but rather crops the original picture. These rooms included pictures of the Marlboro Man (edited images from Marlboro cigarette adds), a series of women and bikes(he took pictures from biker magazines, where girlfriends and wives are shown next to their husbands large motorcycles). I think this is called Cowboys and Girlfriends. These rooms also included books from his collection. Most of these appear to be first editions from the USA and England, where they have different covers. On other galleries there were the large Nurse paintings. With names like Debutante Nurse, Nurse on Green Meadow, Dude Ranch Nurse, Aloha Nurse, and Surgical Nurse. The Nurse paintings are large in scale and very painterly. Typically, the nurse is depicted along with a stenciled title on the canvas.



Then there were the car hoods and car sculptures. The large hoods, hanging on walls, painted in single subdued monochromatic colors, reminded me of Rothkos. The last gallery had large canvases with stenciled phrases on them, and some newer work that was reminicent of DeKooning or late Picasso.













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Posted: Friday - March 21, 2008 at 01:43 PM          

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