RICHARD PRINCE. Seeing Through Images
What happens when images stop being originals—and instead become material to be reused, shifted, and re-seen? The exhibition Richard Prince at the Albertina Museum follows an artist who has spent decades testing the boundaries of authorship, perception, and the visual language of mass media.
In this exhibition portrait, curator Walter Moser traces Richard Prince’s practice back to its origins in the logic of appropriation. As part of the so-called Pictures Generation, Prince belongs to a group of artists who grew up not just with images, but within them. Television, advertising, and print media were not external influences—they were formative environments. From this condition emerges a radical artistic gesture: the act of taking existing images and reframing them as something new.
Prince’s early works already reveal this strategy in its most elemental form. Advertising images, once embedded in commercial contexts, are isolated, re-photographed, and stripped of their textual frameworks. Logos disappear, slogans vanish, and what remains is a strangely familiar yet destabilized visual residue. The gesture is simple, almost minimal—but its implications are far-reaching.
One of the exhibition’s central bodies of work, the Cowboys series, demonstrates how deeply these images are embedded in cultural mythologies. Here, the iconic Marlboro cowboy becomes more than an advertising figure: he stands for freedom, masculinity, and the constructed narratives of the American West. At the same time, he exposes how closely image politics and real politics intertwine—how visual fantasies shape collective imaginaries.
Across decades of work, Prince continuously returns to a central tension: do these appropriated images critique mass media, or do they participate in its seductive logic? Rather than resolving this ambiguity, his work sustains it. It asks viewers to confront their own reading habits, their own expectations of meaning, authorship, and authenticity.
This tension extends into the digital present. In more recent works, Prince turns to social media, appropriating Instagram images and transferring them into the space of art. Here, the logic of mass media evolves into something even more intimate and pervasive: a system in which images, identities, and economic value are inseparably intertwined. What appears free is revealed as structured by exchange—and what is exchanged, ultimately, is attention, data, and self-representation.
The exhibition spans more than five decades of artistic production, yet its questions feel increasingly urgent. In a world saturated with images, Richard Prince does not offer resolution. Instead, it reveals how deeply we are entangled in the systems that produce what we see—and how difficult it is to step outside them.
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