Kukje Gallery, Korea
LEEAHN Gallery, Korea
Private Collection, Korea
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Kunsthalle Zurich, Richard Prince, Paintings, February - April 2002, p. 83, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of overall wear and handling to the sides and edges of the canvas, which appears as surface soiling. There is a 36 inch area of surface craquelure along the left edge, beginning approximately 15 inches from the top left corner. There are a few areas of minor surface soiling along the bottom panel which could possibly be inherent to the artist's working method. Under ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. There are scattered areas of what appear to be drip accretions which fluoresce brightly under ultraviolet light. These seem original to the work and inherent to the artist's working method. Unframed.
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Untitled belongs to a sub-series of Richard Prince’s incomparable Joke paintings known as the White Paintings. In 1985, Prince, whilst living in the back room of 303 Gallery, created the first Joke pieces. With his first Jokes, Prince started by meticulously hand writing jokes across the surface of his canvases. Then, as is demonstrated in the present work, he began to combine jokes and cartoons by silk-screening the images onto varying supports. It is important to note the radical shift in creative process that Prince underwent, reaching its pinnacle in the White Paintings series. Prince was known for his appropriation of advertising images and photographs during the early 1970s. These photographs were borrowed from the high-fashion aesthetic of advertisement and had an alarming slickness to them. Then in the 1980s Richard Prince abandoned photography outright and began to explore the relationship between image and language, pairing jokes from books and magazines, typically satirical one-liners, with referential and non-referential imagery, mostly cartoons. Despite still relying on found source material, all of the Joke paintings show a newfound crudeness and have an alluring deadpan rawness in their finish. It is noteworthy that the jokes almost exclusively deal with mocking familiarities and expectations in typical American values and institutions. Marriage, family, education and employment are all undermined as Richard Prince’s Joke paintings reveal the absurdity inherent to these norms of everyday American life. In painting these jokes, Richard Prince gives them a new found resonance and permanence that is essential in making the viewer pause for a moment to contemplate the greater meaning behind these seemingly throwaway examples of Borsch belt humor.

The White Paintings are an especially beautiful and expressive sub-series of the Joke paintings. Interestingly they combine his newfound appreciation for painting with photography by way of the silkscreen. White Paintings see the continuation of Prince’s techniques as he moved into the third decade of his practice, combining his joke prints with a more diverse, layered approach to his canvases.  Branching out in his practice, Prince’s canvases ramp up the number of possible associations one can make between the jokes and plethora of imagery. Combining silk-screened selections from mass-media publications with his own familiar illustrations of domestic environments, Prince ties together disparate elements of American culture, allowing the interactions of text and image to create new implications and translations. The White Paintings also allude to what was to come in the career of Prince. The new painterly quality combined with silkscreen imagery would become an integral part of every major subsequent new series from the Nurses to de Kooning. The White Paintings represent the key bridge between the early av🍌ant-garde photographer and the mature master painter of contemporary art we laud today.