Prince, a painter and photographer, got his artistic start while working at Time Magazine in the 1970s, using a storage room as a makeshift studio, creating art out of ready-made magazine advertisements, the most famous pieces of which featured the Marlboro Man. Since these early works, his fascination with American identity and American cultural has flourished and he has examined both celebrity and middle-American life.

Spiritual America, created in 1983, photographed a 10-year-old Brook Shields in standing in a bathtub. Extremely controversial, the piece, an allusion to an earlier work by renowned pictorialist and gallery-owner, Alfred Stieglitz, led to lawsuits by Shield’s mother as well as widespread criticism throughout the art community. Later in the 1980s, he received attention for his Joke Paintings that combined coarse humor with hints of Abstract Expressionism, explored notions of sexual frustration and were further exposed through his use sporadic texts stenciled throughout his works. The Nurse Paintings, a more recent collection of 19 pieces, digitally scanned the covers of novels from the 1940s and 1950s that featured nurses, printing them onto canvas via inkjets and then obscuring the image through added brushstroke. Hoods, another recent series, sees him cast a series of muscle-car hoods in wood and fiberglass, then paint over with loose strokes.

Retrospective New York’s Guggenheim September 28 2007- January 2008 [ArtObserved]
Richard Prince interview in his upstate studio [ArtObserved via VBS.tv]

Wikipedia Entry

More info about the artist coming soon.

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