Richard Prince wird meist unter dem Aspekt der Appropriation Art diskutiert – von Marlboro-Cowboys in den 1980ern bis zu Instagram-Porträts heute – und doch steht im Zentrum seiner künstlerischen Praxis das eigene Werk als Maler: erst Gemälde von Witzen und Cartoons, dann Krankenschwestern und Cowboys von Groschenroman-Covern, bis zu freien Varianten über Picasso und de Kooning. Für seine neue Serie Super Group benützt Prince ebenfalls Gegenstände, die ihre eigene Bedeutung mitbringen: Innenhüllen von Vinyl-Schallplatten, die er auf der Leinwand collagiert und dann mit Bandnamen, abstrakten Farbflächen und fröhlichen Figuren übermalt. Das Buch zeigt 51 Arbeiten, die sich Fragen der Identität widmen – schließlich definieren wir uns über die Musik, die wir hören. Zwei Texte des Künstlers erkunden die kulturellen Zusammenhänge und schildern die Freude der Entdeckung: „Vier Jahre hatte ich mit Plattenhüllen gearbeitet, aber etwas stimmte nicht, die Arbeiten waren nicht fertig. Es fehlte ihnen das Besondere. Es gab Strophe und Mittelteil, aber keinen Refrain. Super Group wurde zum Refrain. Ich kann Roy Orbison, Chuck D, Bill Evans, Patsy Cline, The Pretenders, und Lee Ranaldo auf eine Hülle machen … Die ganze Hülle wird so zum Hit.“ So wird auch der ganze Band zum Hit, der die Vision von Richard Prince mit Bildern und eigenen Texten in ein Künstlerbuch übersetzt.

SUPER GROUP
(Auszug aus dem Text von Richard Prince)

… Six years ago I took a sleeve out of a vinyl album and looked at it and liked the foxing, the beige color, the yellowing, the creases, the weight of the paper, the two-sidedness of the construction and the hole. It also had inherited meaning.
I picked up a pencil and signed it to myself from Richard Hell. I wrote, “From One Richard To Another, Richard Hell 1977.” It wasn’t real, but it was real for me.
Another start.
I glued the sleeve to an album-size canvas and hung it on my studio wall.
I kept it there for another year. This was like 2008.

Instant Karma.

Nothing much happened after that. I kept looking at the Richard Hell sleeve. And kept thinking about making more but the idea of turning record sleeves into fake memorabilia didn’t really excite me.

In 2011 I was checking out my collection of Sonic Youth albums. I pulled out the records and removed the records from the sleeves. There were nine sleeves. I laid out the sleeves in a grid, three on top of three on top of three. Another square. I looked at it and called it Nine Sonic Youths. That excited me. The name, the title connected the abstraction and made it less abstract. It looked like art. It looked like an Agnes Martin with holes. It was creamy.

Want to make art? Don’t.

The next one I did was 16 Kinks.
I only had six Kinks albums so I had to go out to a vinyl store and buy ten more Kinks. Going to the record store changed. It wasn’t just about buying albums. There was a new purpose to going to a record store.

On-purpose.

16 Kinks was the first time I started calling them the Sleeve Paintings.
The next was the Beatles.
I did 87 Beatles.
9 Sonic Youths and 16 Kinks were simply pasted.
The property of the sleeves weren’t touched. The difference in their individuality wasn’t messed with. Their tones were all that mattered. I was making something basic. Really simple. The given patterns and “aging” was what I was looking at.

Preferred.

The Beatles were the first sleeves I painted. There were so many I used a two-part canvas and the way I stuck them to the canvas was with white and off-white acrylic paint. Things got messy. Fits and starts. There were mistakes made and I had so many sleeves to choose from, I would rip some off and put other ones in their place. I had like fifteen copies of Revolver. Using paint as glue became a happy ingredient. The right ingredient. I went to town. “Sergeant Pepper told the band to play.” I was ripping it up.

Rave On.

After the 87 Beatles, I worked on a small canvas and started to use 45 “single” sleeves and paid attention to sleeves that had lyrics printed on them. I also discovered you could order sleeves over the internet. The mail ordering changed the making.
I could order hundreds of sleeves. Black ones. White ones. Ones that looked like the color of a manila envelope.

I was listening to Chuck Berry and wrote down his lyric “riding along in my automobile” on a sleeve.
Scribing lyrics.
It made the idea of “collecting” more important. Prominent.
The meaning of Soul Music according to Raphael Saadiq.
I did a whole painting of The Doors.
I drew the distinctive “font” of The Doors.

I did the same with the Def Leppard font.
At first I was uncomfortable with my handwriting additions.
It was hard to break away from the minimal look of 16 Kinks.
Then the idea of framing my new hands on applications helped me with my indecisiveness.
They were works on papers. You usually frame works on paper. Once I made that connection, the glass and frame made sense. Obvious? Sure. Of course. Sometimes. Why don’t you try it.
Most of the time you swing and miss. When you finally hit it you wonder what took you so long.

Looking at what I listened to.

So that’s what happened …

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In Zusammenarbeit mit Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris