Skarstedt is pleased to present Richard Prince: Nurse Paintings, an exhibition of selected works from the artist’s celebrated series on view at the gallery’s Palm Beach location.
In his appropriations of distinctly American subject matter, Prince’s nurses represent the collective, archetypal fantasy. With starch-white uniforms and matching caps, these standardized beauties present the artist’s continued investigation of gender, fetish, and identity. The solitary figures, overlain on polychromatic grounds of pink, purple, orange, and yellow, vary in pose and proximity – an inauspicious disconnect and pervasive anonymity are sanctioned by obstructive surgical masks. Speaking on his arrival to these themes, Prince notes, “I made a mistake painting all this white… After I had wiped off some of the painting, it looked like a mask on the nurse’s face and suddenly it was one of those moments… It was a way of unifying and also talking about identity” (R. Prince quoted in N. Shukur, Russh Magazine, 2014).
A bibliophile and avid collector of pulp romance novels, Prince digitally scanned, projected, and printed the covers of these 1950-60s paperbacks onto canvas, the typeface of the original titles overhead, taglines and dime-store prices veiled by Prince’s expressionistic strokes of color, introducing the artist at his most painterly. The combined appropriation of sultry medical fiction and Abstract Expressionism plays on Prince’s love of the high and low, feminine and masculine – the dichotomy questioning both mass culture and the post-war aesthetic. With this twist of irony, Prince’s defies trumped-up performative sexual tropes, offering a counterpart to the machismo of his re-photographed Marlboro cowboys.
