Richard Prince New Cowboys – KARMA 2017 Artist Book Edition of 500

Description

Richard Prince has been dismantling the mythology of the American cowboy for more than four decades, beginning with his famous rephotographed Marlboro advertisements around 1980. New Cowboys returns to that territory in a deceptively beautiful large-format artist’s book, but Prince leaves the physical history of his source material visible: tears, scratches, folds, discoloration and other imperfections become part of the pictures themselves. Cowboys gallop across green fields, herd horses through glowing landscapes, ride beneath enormous Western skies and move through snow-covered mountains—the heroic advertising fantasy still recognizable, but now battered, enlarged and recontextualized. KARMA produced the book in 2017 in an edition of just 500 copies, measuring an unusually generous 15¼ × 11½ inches.

The result is quintessential Prince: imagery so deeply embedded in American visual culture that it initially feels familiar, until the act of appropriation begins to undermine what you’re looking at. The Marlboro cowboy—once manufactured to sell cigarettes—becomes anonymous source material, and the imperfections of the printed originals become evidence of their previous lives. Prince’s Cowboys are among the foundational works of appropriation art; New Cowboys is a late continuation of that investigation presented as an artist’s publication rather than a conventional exhibition catalogue. This regular edition was limited to only 500 copies and is now listed by KARMA as out of print; KARMA also produced a separate special edition.

A terrific large-format Richard Prince artist’s book—and a particularly accessible way into one of the defining bodies of work in American appropriation art.