Richard Prince — New Portraits

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo, 2016
Screw-bound acrylic hardcover
64 pp.
26 × 33 cm
Colour offset printing
Edition of 1,000
ISBN: 978-0-9861128-4-3

Condition: Very good. Light surface scratching, rubbing, and handling marks to acrylic covers, consistent with the material. Interior clean. Original Japanese bookseller sticker (Komiyama Tokyo) to front cover. Screw binding intact.

Published by Blum & Poe in 2016, following Richard Prince’s New Portraits exhibition at Blum & Poe Tokyo, 3 April–30 May 2015. The book holds installation views, reproductions from the New Portraits series, and Prince’s ‘Bird Talk’ text in Japanese and English.

A book made after the feed had already been enlarged, printed, exhibited, argued over, and returned to print. Instagram appears here not as platform but as support. The portrait is no longer a post, not exactly a painting, not simply a reproduction. It has passed through several systems of authorisation and arrives as a bound object.

The acrylic covers extend the logic of display. Transparent, reflective, protective, and slightly industrial, they make the catalogue behave closer to a case file or portable vitrine.

Within Prince’s longer practice of appropriation, joke transfer, advertising extraction, and re-captioned American image culture, New Portraits marks the point where social media becomes both source and surface. Authorship is not removed; it is displaced, commented on, enlarged, litigated, and reissued. The catalogue remains as residue of that passage.

Original period publication.
Shipping and handling included in the listed price.