Richard Prince — Panama Pavilion, Venezia, June–July 2007 — Exhibition Postcard

Exhibition postcard
Panama Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, Venezia
9.5 × 15.2 cm
Offset print on card stock
June–July 2007
Published by Gebr. König Postkarten Verlag, Köln

Issued alongside Richard Prince’s semi-fictional Panama Pavilion intervention staged during the 2007 Venice Biennale. Rather than representing an official national pavilion, Prince effectively invented one — inserting himself into the language and prestige structure of the Biennale through posters, postcards, books, and promotional material that mimicked the administrative surface of a legitimate state presentation.

The gesture operates on several levels. Prince had long claimed, half-seriously, that he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, allowing the fictional pavilion to function as both autobiographical myth and institutional prank. Like much of his work surrounding jokes, cowboys, nurses, and appropriated Americana, the truth-status remains deliberately unstable. The pavilion becomes another authored fiction: part self-invention, part critique of national representation, part branding exercise.

The Young Nurses imagery connects the postcard to Prince’s nurse paintings — by 2007 already one of his most recognizable and controversial series. Filtered pulp-paperback fantasies transformed into large-scale paintings oscillating between desire, anonymity, fetish, and reproduction.

Compared to the larger Panama Pavilion posters, postcards from the project appear significantly less common on the secondary market. They were never the “main” artwork, which paradoxically makes surviving examples more compelling within a contemporary ephemera context.

A printed support for a pavilion that did not officially exist. Institutional parody reduced to postcard scale.

Condition: Very good vintage condition. Light surface wear and minor handling marks consistent with age and circulation.

Shipping and handling included.