Beschreibung:

Richard Prince Mumbai after Dark 2009 inkjet and acrylic on canvas 150 x 188 cm (59 x 74 in)
Provenance Gagosian Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner Catalogue Essay Untitled (Mumbai After Dark), from 2009, marks the beginning of the collaboration between the artist Richard Prince and the fashion brand Louis Vuitton. The design brand’s creative director Marc Jacobs stated in an interview that after he had asked Prince to collaborate with him, Prince started to look for cheap paperbacks that were set in exotic cities with ‘after dark’ in the title. As Jacobs put it, “[Prince] asked me, what about Louis Vuitton after dark?” (this and the following quotations are from N.Skukur, ‘Interview with Richard Prince’, Russh Magazine, 2010). “The After Dark series is another subject matter that’s just starting for me. It started when I met with Marc Jacobs a couple of years ago. I started to come up with some ideas for a campaign and one of the ideas was Louis Vuitton after dark. I also just remembered I had all these ‘After Dark’ books in my library and what I liked about them was, aside from the suggestion of what that actually means, the books had been written in all these different cities that I would find. I tried to hunt them down and every country seemed to have an ‘After Dark’ book. I liked the little text that went with it and I liked the font.” Not only did the Louis Vuitton Spring collection in 2008 spark the After Dark series, it also was inspired quite directly by Prince’s Nurse Paintings. One year later, Prince covered the entire exterior of the Hong Kong Museum with printed fabrics featuring bright colours and animated graphics in close collaboration with Louis Vuitton. Each panel illustrates after-midnight stories in different cities around the world, with every other panel representing ‘Hong Kong After Dark’. Prince remarked: “It was sort of like a performance that evening [at the opening of the Hong Kong Museum of Art]. They had nurses coming out with the handbags. It was quite exciting. I had never been to a fashion show and my daughter was very excited – the music and the cameras, the paparazzi and the celebrities.” Including the well-known paintings such as London After Dark, Berlin After Dark, Moscow After Dark and Mumbai After Dark, Prince found 17 books of the series that were published in the late 1960s and 70s. After the main body that stands out through a Turner-like makeover, Prince decided to prolong the series and produce his own ‘after dark’ books: “What you can do now with technology is you can publish your own book very quickly so we’re making our own After Dark books in the studio and the copy we’re putting on the books really has nothing to do with the image or the city, the copy comes out of a series of sentences that I’ve written over the years called Bird Talk.” Read More Artist Bio Richard Prince American • 1947 While some artists are known for a signature style, Richard Prince is most closely associated with his subject matter: for instance, Cowboys, his series of the Marlboro man magnified between 1980 and 1994; Nurses, sinister yet seductive, all copies from pulp novel covers; joke text paintings, simple block lettering of his own or appropriated jokes. Often labelled an artist of the Pictures Generation alongside Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo Prince has been said to be the contemporary artist who most understands the depth and influence of mass media over life in the 20th and 21st centuries. In whichever medium Prince chooses to work, he stays within the realm of appropriation. Of course Prince is not met without controversy, and he has been on the losing end of several lawsuits involving copyright infringement. His "Instagram" series — unedited reproductions of content posted by models, influencers and celebrities on their personal feeds — sold for upwards of $100,000 at primary market, making for a memorable moment at Frieze Week New York in 2015. View More Works