RICHARD PRINCE — New Paintings, Jablonka Galerie, Köln, 1996

Published for Richard Prince’s 1996 exhibition at Jablonka Galerie, Cologne. Softcover, staple-bound; 18 pages, 24 × 30 cm; colour and black-and-white illustrations.

This unusually spare catalogue documents a group of his Joke Paintings: works in which anonymous one-liners, sexual jokes and fragments of vernacular humour are relocated from everyday circulation into painting. Prince had already spent more than a decade working with images that appeared to belong everywhere and nowhere — advertising photographs, magazine imagery, cowboys and other material detached from its original context. With the jokes, the appropriation becomes almost immaterial. There is no photograph to steal and often no identifiable author: only language already passed from person to person.

The publication makes that movement visible again. A joke becomes a painting. The painting becomes a photograph. The photograph returns to paper. The catalogue is therefore not simply documentation of Prince’s work; it participates in the same system of copying, displacement and recirculation that produced it.

Its design is particularly good in this respect. The pink wrapper announces RICHARD PRINCE almost like a brand, while inside jokes sit alone on largely empty pages before encountering reproductions of the paintings. Name, language and image repeatedly separate and reattach.

A modest exhibition catalogue with an unusually direct relationship to the mechanics of the work it records: authorship transferred rather than resolved.

Condition: Good. General handling and surface wear, fading and toning to the pink wrappers, particularly toward the spine and edges, with minor creasing and marks consistent with age. Internally clean overall.

Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.