RICHARD PRINCE — de Kooning, Gagosian Gallery, Paris, 2011

Folded exhibition invitation for Richard Prince’s de Kooning exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Paris, held 30 March–21 May 2011. Opening reception: Tuesday 29 March, 5–8 pm.

Oversized card, printed in colour on card stock and folded once, with a full image spread across the interior and exhibition details set on a vertical white panel. Dimensions: 21 × 25.5 cm folded; 25.5 × 37 cm unfolded.

The front presents a cropped reproduction from Prince’s de Kooning series against a warm peach ground, already staging the collision the works depend on: quotation, distortion, repainting, and the unstable return of a canonical image through another artist’s hand. Opened out, the card expands into a near full-bleed detail, intensifying the abrasive facture and unstable figuration associated with the series. The reverse is nearly blank, carrying only the work caption in small type: Untitled (de Kooning), 2009, inkjet and acrylic on canvas.

What circulates here is not only an announcement but a compressed statement of method. Prince’s de Kooning paintings rework Willem de Kooning’s already volatile women into a second-order image economy of reproduction, collage, and repainting. In invitation form, that logic becomes especially clear: the card itself operates through cropping, folding, enlargement, and redistribution. A work about appropriation is encountered through another act of appropriation.

Condition: light handling wear and minor corner and edge rubbing consistent with age and storage; structurally sound and clean overall.