Together for the first time in a comprehensive exhibition, Richard Prince: Protest Paintings (1986 – 1994) will be on view at Skarstedt London from October 2013. Protest Paintings is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at Skarstedt. A detailed catalogue will be published on the Protest Paintings, marking the first publication to be devoted solely to this exceptional body of work.

Rising to prominence in the 1980s, Richard Prince is a celebrated pioneer of a critical approach to art making. Appropriating images and text from advertising and popular culture, his photographs, sculptures and paintings explore ideas of American identity and consumerism, whilst simultaneously challenging ideas of authorship and the privileged status of the unique artwork. Prince has been the subject of solo exhibitions at leading institutions worldwide, including Serpentine Gallery, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and IVAM, Valencia amongst others.

Painted on a vertical canvas in the shape of a protest placard, the Protest Paintings alternate between monochromatic minimalism and richly layered colourful abstraction. Incorporating recycled jokes, printed and hand-written, as well as mined pattern details silkscreened onto the canvas, these paintings are characteristic of Prince’s tenet of appropriation. A mainstay in his art, the classic one-liners offer comic respite, whilst also challenging the high/low art divide. Masking a menacing truth behind a veil of humour, the jokes are subversive in their purpose. As the curator Nancy Spector writes in an essay on Prince: ‘humor is a serious business.’ Featuring paintings from public and private collections, the exhibition demonstrates the breadth of Prince’s creativity in this singular body of work. The range of paintings on show includes monochrome canvases with printed and handwritten jokes, patterned canvases with block text and brightly coloured abstract compositions overlaid with graffiti and drip marks.

Purposefully ambiguous, the scrawled slogans resist interpretation, enacting their very own protest through language. Refusing to conform to the standards of the art value system, the Protest Paintings seemingly channel the spirit of the 1960’s counterculture, a defining era to which Prince bore witness.

In contrast to the formulaic design of the earlier Monochrome Joke paintings, in the Protest Paintings we see Prince’s full creative involvement. Carefully assembling different segments of canvas to form the symbolic crossbow shape of the protest placard, Prince combines gestural brushstrokes with underpainting, silkscreen and disjointed signs, to create a palimpsest of art historical reference and his own particular brand of humour. A visual expression of the performativity that is both characteristic of a protest and a constant element throughout Prince’s oeuvre, the Protest Paintings are a masterful example of Prince’s unique artistic practice.

Richard Prince was born in Panama in 1949. He began consolidating his style of appropriation during the early 1970s, whilst working at Time-Life publishing company in the tear-sheets department. A witness to the powerful impact of mass media images in shaping consumer culture, Prince furthered his exploration of the relationship between image and language, pairing jokes from books and magazines, typically satirical one-liners, with referential and non-referential imagery, mostly cartoons to create his celebrated Joke and White Paintings. Redefining concepts of authorship, ownership and the artist, Prince’s multifarious works demonstrate his avid engagement with the construction of American identity and the role contemporary culture has to play in its construction. His iconic photographs of Cowboys, as well as the sculptural Hoods, are a commentary on American consumerism and a constructed reality based on stereotyped notions of masculine virility. Other coveted series include his Nurse Paintings, which take figures from medical romance novels and transform them into striking, mysterious and oftentimes gruesome characters. Recent works are overtly painterly in nature and demonstrate his reverence for such 20th century masters of painting as Willem de Kooning. Richard Prince lives and works in Upstate New York.

Skarstedt was founded in 1994 by Per Skarstedt to mount historical exhibitions by contemporary European and American artists that had become the core of his specialty in Sweden and New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Skarstedt’s New York gallery is located on 79 Street and Madison Avenue in an historic building, formerly the renowned Rosenberg Gallery. In October 2012, Skarstedt opened its London space on Old Bond Street with the inaugural exhibition Andy Warhol: The American Indian.

Skarstedt’s programme reflects the gallery’s established area of expertise whilst also expanding its focus to include historically-researched exhibitions of museum quality. Skarstedt’s unique relationship with artists allows it to present exhibitions both on the primary and secondary markets, creating a dialogue between the generations. Skarstedt is committed to sharing both its aesthetic perspective and philosophical approach whilst working with prominent international museums and private collections around the world.