Richard Prince Posters In Marfa

richard prince poster painting is an inkjet of a rephoto of a collage of seven little pictures of posters for sale, with their captions, including a modigliani nude, a fat joint, an acid trip-colored cat, graphics of the world burning and a nude couple embracing, and a poster that says today the first day of the rest of your life, via galerie max hetzler — Richard Prince, *Untitled*, 2016–2017, inkjet and acrylic on canvas 276.9 x 304.8 cm.,
©[?] Richard Prince Studio, courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London | Marfa

Turns out Richard Prince has made a lot more than one Poster. Max Hetzler is opening a whole show, today, in Marfa, of “a large body of” Prince Poster works on both paper and canvas. Some of them are huge, like ten feet across. Inkjetted and overpainted rephotographs of collages of the tiny, postage stamp-sized posters and captions. For all their media, appropriation, and cultural content, they also show a lot of interest in scale.

a 1986 photo work of richard prince features a grid of nine rephotographs of cowboys, either in vertical or horizontal orientation, with a lot of white space around them, because they were all originally slides arranged on a lightbox, printed four feet wide and like eight feet tall, but much of the upper and lower parts of the sheet are blank. sold at christies in may 2025 — Richard Prince, *Untitled (Cowboys 4)*, 1986, 86 x 47 in., ektacolor print, ap from an ed. of 2 at Christie’s

Prince’s gangs were rephotographs of slides on a lightbox, where composition was driven by the cardboard frames of the slides. [An awesome 1986 gang of cowboys at Christie’s this week makes this clear; the cowboys themselves are cropped tightly and distinctively within each slide, while the slides themselves are rotated, but that’s it. 48-inch rolls were probably the widest Ektacolor paper you could get in 1986.]

what turns out to be a large, 9-10 ft inkjet canvas of a color image of a poster that is probably less than an inch wide when it was published in a magazine in the late 1960s or early 1970s. the image of a young white nude couple embracing in an open landscape, horizon low, mostly sky, with a title/caption, come together. Above it is a cropped caption of another poster, she comes in colors. from max hetzler in may 2025 — Richard Prince, Untitled, 2016, inkjet on canvas, 241.3 x 236.9 cm, &c &c., via Hetzler Marfa

In addition to being larger than the magazine pages they’re sourced from, Poster works include the dimensions of each poster alongside. A huge color inkjet from 2016, called the show’s lead image in the publicity materials the gallery sent out—which appears in this buck wild pre-review from the Big Bend Sentinel, what a lede—is dominated by the moiré dots from the magazine’s four-color printing process. The caption from the poster above is unmissable, ofc, but I also just noticed a tiny row of dots left along the bottom edge of the canvas from whatever poster was below it.

a screencap of a marked up excerpt from dan nagel's biography of r. crumb about the rise of the poster market in 1967-68, which includes the sentence, "Life magazine gave them a boost in its September 1, 1967 issue, hailing 'walls and walls of expendable art.'" marked, presumably, by richard prince, and distributed by galerie max hetzler in may 2025

I wrote a bit about the political and aesthetic history of Prince’s Poster works in 2017, when he was only presenting them on Instagram. This moment and the movement both remain relevant to the artist today. One of the two documents the gallery provided, “to be used as-is,” is a screenshot of a marked up passage from Dan Nadel’s new biography of cartoon artist R. Crumb. It’s about “the height of the poster boom, from 1966 to 1968,” when LIFE magazine ran an 8-page cover story about “walls and walls of expendable art.” “Expendable art” has now displaced “wall art” as my favorite category of art.

the cover of the sept. 1 1967 issue of life magazine features an overlapping collage of posters under the heading, "the big poster hang-up—walls and walls of expendable art." and also a teaser, brazen empire of organized crime." — Life Magazine, Sept 1, 1967, amazingly, the “walls and walls of expendable art” are only the second-most important aesthetics in this issue, after the Garden of Murdered Capos statues on the Livingston, NJ estate of a leader of the Genovese crime syndicate.

I will add installation views when they drop, to get a sense of scale and scope. Hetzler opened a gallery, a gallery artist residency, and perhaps a residence, in Marfa in 2022, where they stage one show a year. It is located east of town, but south of the Marfa Municipal Golf Course, on a tract of open desert that has been cut up into five-acre lots, which have been, in turn, reassembled into 15-25 acre properties. Hetzler’s may actually be the second prefab Butler Building-turned-gallery in the neighborhood; the other is Maintenant, a gallery and boxing gym, which focuses on “work made across the Chihuahuan Desert – including Chihuahua City, El Paso, and Juarez – as well as in France and Chicago.”

Free boxing practices are held on Sunday and Thursday mornings. Prince’s show will be up through December.

screencap of joan_katzz's instagram post of an installation shot of richard prince's posters show at galerie max hetzler marfa, on 17 may 2025, documents four large, mostly square canvases of blown up rephotos of collaged grids of 1960s Marboro Posters magazine ads in a white clerestoried gallery space — Oh hey, look what @joan_katzz just posted on instagram: a whole carousel of installation shots and *Posters* posters. Walls and walls of expendable art indeed. Incredible.

Richard Prince, Posters, 17 May — 7 Dec 2025 [Max Hetzler Marfa, s/o Sabrina]
Previously, related:
MORE Richard Prince Posters (two wks ag0)
Marboro Man: Richard Prince New Posters (2017)