Richard Prince, Richard Prince. Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, 1988. Softcover; 48 pages, 20 × 26 cm; colour and black-and-white offset printing.
An early Richard Prince publication from the point at which the artist’s handling of found photographs, magazine imagery, cartoons, celebrity, cars and borrowed voices was becoming a complete working system.
Published by Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 1988, the book does more than reproduce works. It places Prince’s material back into circulation as printed matter: photographs beside fragments of autobiography, appropriated imagery beside apparently personal observation, the source and its reuse deliberately left close enough to remain unstable.
That distinction matters here. Prince’s work begins with material that already exists in the world — photographs, advertisements, jokes, magazines, other people’s language — but its meaning changes through selection, repetition and placement. The publication becomes another stage of that movement. What began elsewhere enters the gallery, then returns to the page carrying a different status.
The book is therefore particularly legible within The New Rare: not simply a catalogue documenting Richard Prince, but a physical object produced inside the same economy of copying, circulation, attribution and reassignment that the work itself examines. An early printed object in which the document does not sit outside the work. It participates in it.
Condition: Good. Light handling and shelf wear consistent with age, including minor rubbing and edge wear. Internally well preserved overall. Please refer to photographs.
Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.
