MUNICH, GERMANY.- The Goetz Collection presents Richard Prince, through May 21, 2005. Although Richard Prince, born in 1949, has become a highly recognizable artist through numerous exhibitions, his oeuvre remains mysterious and cannot be clearly categorized. The Sammlung Goetz is showing a selection of over 50 works and arrangements from nearly all the artist’s phases in an extensive retrospective exhibition; curators are Ingvild Goetz and Rainald Schumacher.

In 1978 the American artist began photographing clippings of advertisements. Since then, Prince has used primarily pictures and aesthetic guidelines from unknown sources and has adopted their motifs. Taken out their original context, the pictures seem to unfold their potential or latent meaning anew. The most famous group of works from this time, and a trademark from Prince, are the photographs of the Marlboro advertisements.

Around 1984 Prince began to group photos into ‘gangs,’ for example in Criminals and Celebrities (1986) or Creative Evolution (1984-85); their appearance is comparable with a highly enlarged contact print from a photo lab. Furthermore he dealt with the biker subculture. The results were the girlfriends or biker chicks, for example in the series Cowboys and Girlfriends (1992). Also since the middle of the eighties jokes from diverse magazines from the fifties and sixties, ranging from Reader’s Digest to Playboy, play a decisive role. Over time the jokes, which in the beginning were written by hand on small sheets of paper, were transformed into monumental joke paintings. The publicity photographs of pop and subculture celebrities, which Prince collects and then groups, form another central theme.

In his newest works, the nurse series, Prince devotes his attention to the covers of American pulp fiction from the fifties. Prince’s oeuvre comprises photography, painting and sculpture, as well as literary fiction and commercial photography for CD covers of rock and electro bands, such as the French band Air.

A catalogue will be published for the exhibition with pictures of the works shown and texts from Ingvild Goetz, Ralph Rugoff, Rainald Schumacher and Richard Prince; approximately 150 pages and 100 color pictures, German/English. Order in book stores or at the museum € 30.