richard prince – greg.org

Butched Up Nurse Paintings: Richard Prince, Eden Rock

a three row grid of 18 richard prince paintings, each depicting the rugged or rough lower half of a male figure in some kind of peril or post-apocalyptic conundrum, with everything else painted over in messy brushy white. for sale at christie's in february 2026 — Richard Prince, *Eden Rock*, 2005-06, eighteen acrylic on canvas, each 24 x 30 in., at Christie’s

The Edlis Neesons are selling a set of eighteen Richard Prince Eden Rock paintings at Christie’s. They’re overpainted appropriations of the covers of a pulp sci-fi book series called Deathlands, sort of butched up, post-apocalyptic nurse paintings. But greg.org readers may know them for their starring role in Eden Rock: The Movie, Prince’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi concept set in St. Bart’s. These Deathlands paintings were one tribe in Eden Rock; the Canal Zone Rastas were another; and the pin-up girls (from a Taschen book) scattered throughout the Canal Zone paintings were a third. [Fun fact: Eden Rock was the movie/pitch. Prince’s working title for these paintings, which read somewhere between a moodboard and a storyboard, was In My Movie.]

a painting mostly brushy white overpaint, except for the lower half of a male figure on the right edge, in torn jeans, with a massive axe, one foot on a human skull that has daisies growing out of its eye socket, it's' a painting by richard prince based on the cover of a deathlands novel by james axler — Richard Prince, Eden Rock, 2005-06, DL 45, inv. #455, 24 x 30 in., supposedly acrylic on canvas, one of 18 at Christie’s 26 Feb 2026

Three of Edlis/Neeson’s paintings were begun in 2005, and all were completed in 2006. Of those three, this one with the skull has the lowest inventory number, so maybe it was first? Prince was on it for a while, though; sixteen 0thers in the series that Prince showed at the actual Eden Rock Hotel over Christmas/New Year’s 2007-08 were listed as 2006-07. [FWIW, in an Eden Rock inventory filed in the Cariou trial, the walk-in price was $150,000, and all sixteen had buyers listed. At least one re-sold—maybe by David Ganek—for $87,500 in 2020. Christie’s estimates the Edlis Neesons’ set at $500-700,000.]

the cover of deathlands, skyfall by james axler is a painting of the lower half of of a macho man's body in torn jeans, with an axe, a bowie knife, boots, a skull at his feet with flowers growing out of the eye sockets, in a brown wasteland — Deathlands 45, Starfall, cover

I thought that Canal Zone connection would be the most interesting thing about these paintings, but I’m turning out to be wrong. From the low-res images I’d seen, I’d always assumed these were paint-for-hire copies of the covers, which he then whited out by hand. But they’re stroke-for-stroke matches, which means they’d have to be inkjets. Except unlike the nurse paintings, they’re listed only as acrylic, and they’re on pre-stretched canvases. Also, Prince’s painting contains elements cropped from the cover. So either Prince extrapolated, or he was working from the original painting. Around the same time, Prince created a series called Untitled (Originals), which paired a pulp novel with its original cover art. Maybe the Eden Rock paintings are similar. In any case, they may not be what they say, and they are definitely not what they seem.

Lot 362, 26 Feb 2026: Richard Prince, Eden Rock, $500-700k [update: sold for $500k hammer, $635,000 all in] [christies]
Eden Rock paintings [richardprince.com]
Previously, related, 2011: “The movie is called Eden Rock…”

It’s No Joke

a glenn ligon edition on white paper in a white frame on a white wall has black marker lines crossing out all the text of a richard prince joke painting study except the last, "Black man: what you kickin' about, you white, ain't you?" the title is punchline, 2024 via hauser & wirth — Glenn Ligon, Punchline, 2024, Digital image with hand-drawn additions in marker, 12 x 9 in., ed. 12/25 +10 APs, photo: © Glenn Ligon, Ron Amstutz via Hauser & Wirth

One thing I love about this edition [which greg.org hero Matt tipped me off about] in Glenn Ligon’s new show of works on paper at Hauser & Wirth , is that Ligon did not use the digital image of the 1989 study from Punchlines, Sotheby’s themed online sale of Richard Prince jokes in December 2023 as the base for his hand-drawn redactions.

a 1989 richard prince taped together collage of a cropped text of two jokes on white paper in a white frame on a white wall at sotheby's in 2023, where one joke is about a hippie hitchhiker being mistaken for a girl and finna be raped by a trucker, and the other joke is about a white man who complains like job about losing everything, and a Black man saying, yeah but you're still white. — Richard Prince, Untitled (Study for Joke Painting), 1989, ballpoint pen, tape and printed paper on paper,
12 by 9 in., sold at Sotheby’s 15 Dec 2023 for $7,620

Ligon’s image of Prince’s printed, clipped, annotated, taped, three-layer study has different shadows along the edges of the collage, so a different lighting situation than when Sotheby’s photographed it. Did Ligon photograph it while on view? Did he buy it? That would be some praxis. [And with an edition of 25, a great ROI.]

The dimensions of Ligon’s edition and Prince’s study are identical—and I love how Ligon signs his in a way that echoes Prince. But that’s just the dimension of the sheet; in fact, Ligon is presenting his work, Punchline (2024), in an identical frame, too. The facsimile objecthood is strong with this one.

Except, of course, Ligon’s intervention completely transforms the work. It’s not that his crossouts eliminate the rape and racist jokes; you can still make them out, if you’re determined to. But he changes entirely the delivery and impact of the punchline [sic], which is not, of course, much of a punchline at all.

When I went looking to see if Prince ever made a painting with this double joke printed 16 inches wide, I didn’t find one. But I did find one of Prince’s joke sources: The Official Black Joke Book/The Official White Joke Book, a 1975 addition to a long series of Official [Some Target Group] Joke Books by Larry Wilde. [So far, the text of the hippie hitchhiker joke does not appear anywhere online outside of Prince’s own oeuvre.]

Ligon recomposes the text, but also reauthors it in ways that matter, and that highlight the mechanisms of appropriation. In his Cariou deposition Prince talks about wanting “to be a girlfriend,” wanting dreads and to be a Rasta he saw at a bar in St. Barth. And when he can’t, he says, “Maybe I should paint them. Maybe that’s a way to substitute that desire.” Now there’s a thread to pull on, which runs through Prince’s work, but also through the white male gaze culture he was soaking in and drawing from.

Text, appropriation, painting, history, racialized experience, queerness. This one print has me questioning whose tools are being used here, whose house is being dismantled, and what’s being built in its place. I’m not sure there’s another artist working now who could make so little into so much.

Glenn Ligon: Late at night, early in the morning, at noon, is at Hauser & Wirth @ the Roxy from 15 January until 4 April 2026 [hauserwirth]
Punchlines: 18 Jokes by Richard Prince, 15 Dec 2023, Lot 18 [sothebys]

Chara Schreyer Facsimile Objects

a photo of a glenn ligon neon sculpture in which the word america is shown twice in white, right side up and upside down, and the lower letters are painted black, so the white neon reflects on the wall behind them. this full-scale photo was made for collector chara schreyer for some reason — *Photograph after Glenn Ligon (Double America, 2012*, 36 x 120 in.), 2016, Diasec flush-mounted, 44 x 129 in. sold from the Estate of Chara Schreyer in 2023. Were the power cables photoshopped out, or did Schreyer have them hidden in the wall?

I cannot remember what I was searching for when I found the buck wildest things sold from the collection of quirky legend Chara Schreyer, but it was not a 13-foot long face-mounted photo of a Glenn Ligon neon sculpture.

Prince & Johns: Now He’s Doing My Act

a richard prince canvas is collaged with an irregular grid of inkjet images, mostly black and white, of various prince sculptures, including sawhorses, a coffin, a bone, some muscle cars, a tightly cropped almost abstract image of a black bra on a white back. many pictures are overdrawn with loose doodle like elements, and all are outlined or roughly held into a composition with black paintlines, forming a raggedy grid. untitled folk songs is from 2022 and was shown at gagosian in nov 2025 — Richard Prince, Untitled (Folk Songs), 2022. Acrylic, oil stick, collage, and inkjet on canvas, 63 ¼ × 61 ¼ inches (160.7 × 155.6 cm) © [sic] Richard Prince. Photo: Jena Cumbo Photography, image via Gagosian

I still have to see Richard Prince’s current show at Gagosian, and from the pre-press, I thought I’d be more interested in the sculptures. But looking through the works online, a couple of good-looking paintings reminded me of his hippie drawing paintings, which are works I regularly dig. And a couple, like Untitled (Folk Songs) above, from 2022, remind me—very unexpectedly—of Jasper Johns. And those are two streams I somehow never imagined would cross on this blog.

decoy, a 1971 jasper johns painting, is a mostly black field of brushstrokes surrounding an overpainted picture of a ballantine beer can, with johns's characteristic stenciled color name text winding across it. along the bottom edge of the painting are six photo-type images of johns sculptures, like beer cans, and flashlights, reproduced in paint and outlined in brushy open pale grey strokes of paint. — Jasper Johns, Decoy, 1971, oil and brass grommet on canvas, 72 x 49 7/8 in., sold by SI Newhouse’s ghost at Christie’s in 2023, after being shown at the Whitney in 2021-22.

But maybe the surprise is from the Johns side. Just the other day @digitaldetritus posted an important but underappreciated [by me, anyway] Johns on tumblr: Decoy from 1971. Decoy was a painted variation of a complex series of prints, which were all part of a larger, retrospective reworking of Johns’ sculptures.

NGL, it was the heavily processed mechanical images of the sculptures that first made the connection. But then it was seeing the connective tissue of messy, even aggressively messy brushstrokes extend across both paintings. Prince talks a lot about de Kooning and Picasso, and there are interesting Guston shoutouts in other paintings in the show. But it was less this kind of throwback reference or direct engagement than the realization that some of Johns’s painting rhymed, or reverberated, with what Prince was doing.

Jenny Holzer Panty Hose, Richard Prince Blouse

a black cardboard pack of black panty house that says barneys new york on it in silver letters, circa 1993, via wrong answer dot ca — Jenny Holzer, THE FUTURE IS STUPID panty hose, 1993, for the AmFAR X Barneys Art Object collection, via WrongAnswer.ca

Geoff Snack posted this unopened pair of Jenny Holzer panty hose to WrongAnswer this morning, and now they’re gone. Of all the artist-designed clothing editions in the 1993 AmFAR Art Object collaboration with Barneys, I think the Jenny Holzer panty hose are the most vulnerable.

a white cotton blouse with an elongated collar and wide curved cuffs, on which are embroidered a joke by richard prince, a 1993 art object edition sold via artsy — Richard Prince, joke shirt, ed. 150, 1993, embroidery on cotton, Art Object for AmFAR & Barney’s [sold] via Bengtsson Fine Arts

You could wear the Robert Rauschenberg tie, or the blouse with Richard Prince’s joke embroidered on the cuff—”My parents kept me in a closet for years. Until I was 15, I thought I was a suit.”—and it would survive. But put the Jenny Holzer panty hose on so you can read THE FUTURE IS STUPID or TURN SOFT AND LOVELY ANY TIME YOU HAVE THE CHANCE running down the back of your leg, and the clock is ticking. Or the pendant watch with Cindy Sherman dressed as a fortune teller.

Kenny Scharf has the Art Object print ad [pdf] listing all 19 artist collabs, and honestly Prada making a JSG Boggs backpack is an even wilder combo than Frette making Scharf’s napkins. ~~What a world.~~ [see below]

Jenny Holzer THE FUTURE IS STUPID Panty Hose, 1993 [wronganswer.ca]
Richard Prince X Barneys X AmFAR shirt at Bengtsson Fine Arts [artsy]
LOL 05 Oct 2023, Lot 708: A white cotton shirt for Art Object by Richard Prince, sold for £10 [busby’s]
hold up, I was all over this 2023 sale of artist books and ephemera and missed two pairs of Jenny Holzer panty hose?? [wright20]

[NEXT MORNING UPDATE] So a pair sold on eBay YESTERDAY. There were Jenny Holzer panty hose at Printed Matter. I mentioned them to a friend just now, and he was all, “Hah, yeah, I remember them from Barneys. AmFAR. I had some and sold them.” So while until yesterday I thought I’d been living in a world oblivious to Jenny Holzer AIDS fundraiser panty hose, I was actually living in a world where everyone around me knew about Jenny Holzer panty hose AND DIDN’T TELL ME.

Richardville

Nate Freeman has an amazing profile of Richard Prince in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. It includes:

several interviews—the most Prince has said in years without being put under oath;
a tour of a sprawling, sculpture-studded compound in Rensellaerville, NY which Larry calls Richardville, the hub of the Prince Cinematic Universe;
and the blazing hot core exchange from Deposition, the seven-hour video epic that played in Rome this summer—which is also a best-selling book, of course, find it at a Harlem parking lot near you—and
a preview of Prince’s new paintings, which will be shown next month at Gagosian.
Oh, and photos by Taryn Simon!

Richard Prince’s Last Stand [vanityfair]

Deposition, Reviewed

a screenshot of richard prince, an older white guy with short receding brown hair, in a white shirt and dark blazer, sitting at an office chair against a blue chroma backdrop, with a bottle of water next to him. time codes in this video screenshot indicate the date and hour in 2018 when he was recorded giving a deposition in his second and third big copyright infringement lawsuits, a supertitle, watch the full deposition, is left over from the very brief moment in 2023 when this video was viewable online at deposition row dot com — Screenshot from 2023, when Richard Prince’s second deposition was streaming at depositionrow.com

Since Richard Prince’s video recording of his 2018 deposition in the McNatt & Graham lawsuits briefly surfaced online in 2023 until it was screened at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis as a work, Deposition (2025), it feels like the number of people who have watched the full 7-hour thing would not have filled the smallest theater at the Quad Cinema.

And yet, it is, over and over again, described by those few who have seen it all as one of the major artworks of our time. Prince himself, in a conversation with Rick Rubin, talked about it as wanting to make a work like Andy Warhol’s Empire. Benjamin Godsill could not stop raving about it on Nota Bene. And now Andrew Russeth has delivered one of the most incisive, close readings of Prince’s Deposition I’ve seen anywhere.

If you’re not going to watch it—again, it’s almost seven hours of Richard Prince talking extremely slowly in an adversarial conversation with offscreen lawyers—Russeth’s take and highlights will get you the gist. And the importance.

For me the standout of this second deposition is the extent Prince will go to to maintain an artistic process of freedom and experimentation, almost five decades into his practice. True, it may be the kind of freedom only available to someone making $45 million/year—the tens of thousands of billable dollars per hour represented by a conference room full of the most expensive lawyers in America doesn’t begin to account for the cost incurred to realize this one video work.

But if you’re an artist with the means to re-create the circumstances of your most surprising, innovative moments of creation, wouldn’t you do it? Shouldn’t you?

The Second Deposition Of Richard Prince, Trade Edition

a screenshot of search results on amazon showing my new publication, the second deposition of richard prince, which is available for $20 right now, and another book, The Deposition of Richard II: "The Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of Richard II" (1399) and Related Writings (Toronto Medieval Latin Texts)
by David R. Carlson | Jan 1, 2007
Paperback, which is currently unavailable. — I saw “2 results for ‘the second deposition of richard prince'”? and then this loaded.

In commemoration of the Roman exhibition of Richard Prince’s Deposition (2025), I present this appropriation, a publication of the unauthorized transcription and accompanying illustration, on a platform of capitalist consolidation.

This softcover version of The Second Deposition of Richard Prince is formatted for easy reading, and includes black and white images of court exhibits being discussed. It also includes a handcrafted index, optimized for art historical and critical discourse.

I’ll have stamped and signed copies available directly, shipping when I get back into my newly militarized town. Or you can buy one or a thousand right now.

Meanwhile, The Deposition of Richard II is a collection of eight late 14th- and early 15th-century Latin texts that chronicle and comment on events that led, in 1399, to the deposition of King Richard II of England and the accession of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV. David R. Carlson published it with the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 2007. At present, according to Abebooks, three copies are available in the UK.

[next morning/evening update] I found a 2009 review of Carlson’s collection of Latin texts by Chris Given-Wilson that makes this accidental algorithmic pairing feels unexpectedly relevant. The embedded quote is from Carlson:

“The Latin style matches the occasion: an unfamiliar, idiosyncratic word-set, repetition and extraordinary verbosity, sentences and clauses so long and involved that even the persons responsible for them sometimes lose grammatical way” Not just lawyers’ Latin, in other words, but a form of lawyers’ Latin appropriate to the gravity of the occasion.
And there was clearly a point to all this, just as there was to the precision of the language, because, as Carlson goes on, “precise sense might matter; also, verbosity can make a statement more exact; and repetition, besides hedging against the inevitable flaw of manuscript transmission…elevates meaning.”

The context-driven, linguistic specificity is also the key to Prince’s Deposition, where the language and discursive structure belong to lawyers, not artists. That clashes with art and the frameworks used to understand and explain art in unfamiliar ways that are sometimes absurd and sometimes revelatory. There is literally a moment when Prince, in the middle of a long and deep monologue about rephotography, is interrupted by the lawyer saying, “Do you remember the question at this point, sir?”

With Deposition, Prince appropriated the entire legal process for his expressive purposes: he used this formal, ritualized interrogation to talk about his art—and then he turned it into art.

Now I want to translate Prince’s deposition into Latin.

Buy The Second Deposition of Richard Prince in softcover on Amazon for $20 [amazon]
Buy one, two, or three copies of David R. Carlson’s, The Deposition of Richard II for $29.70 each, plus $13.44 shipping to the US [abebooks]

The Second Second Deposition of Richard Prince

a stack of white printer paper photographed on a pine tabletop, the words deposition and richard prince are printed in all caps in the center, the words the second and of are written in hand annotations in blue sharpie. — The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, course pack edition, 2025, 11 x 8.5 in.

A full one third of it is an auto-generated, unedited index, but at least it’s getting out there. People who don’t call it Kinko’s have no idea that it didn’t used to cost $30 to print a document.

a white paperback book with the second deposition of richard prince printed on the center of the glossy cover, and a grey band wrapping across the entire cover that reads, not for resale, on a pine tabletop. the proof copy of the paperback edition, which is finna drop — The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, softcover edition, 2025, 9 x 6 in., 120pp

…aaand the third Second Deposition of Richard Prince just arrived.

Richard Prince On Cowboys, From The Second Deposition

Here I am fiddling around with printers to make a paperback version, and he just ‘grams it out.

Of course, it IS his deposition.

For a couple of months now, Richard Prince has been showing Deposition (2025), the single channel video version of his second court-ordered deposition in a copyright infringement lawsuit, at Gavin Brown’s Sant’Andrea de Scaphis space in Rome. The show runs through this Friday, July 25, to andiamo!

a richard prince rephotograph of a marlboro man ad depicts a white cowboy on a black horse, rearing up slightly on its hind legs, in a pale desert ground againsti a dark green leaft backdrop. the ad is torn in half horizontally, and taped together with scotch tape, with a bit missing from the left center, leaving a slightly ragged edge. made in 2016, and published by sant'andrea de scaphis in rome — Richard Prince, *Untitled (cowboy)*, 2016, C-print in two parts, Richard Prince Studio via Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

In the mean time, though, S’AdS has posted an excerpt from the [200 page] transcript, where Prince discusses the development of his Cowboy photos. It’s very good stuff:

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.

Nobody Expects The Roma Deposition

this altered version of Caravaggio's Deposition from the Vatican Museums in Roma is a cascade of mourning figures holding or looming over the dead but still absolutely caked up body of Our Lord, with an outsized clipped version of Richard Prince's under-oath face roughly pasted onto the main figure in the center, the one who is holding Jesus, but, importantly, also looking straight at the viewer. Obviously, since this is a picture about Prince's deposition in a lawsuit, the so-called correct thing would be to paste his face on Jesus's, and in less apocalyptic times, I might have, but [looks at the world] I'm not taking that chance rn

For a brief shining moment in 2023, a website called depositionrow.com hosted the entire 6h42m42s video of Richard Prince’s deposition in the copyright infringement lawsuit over his Instagram New Portraits. And then it was gone.

Well, now you can watch it again. Starting today, it is playing on a computer on a table in a Janis Kounellis installation at Sant’Andrea di Scaphis in Rome, Gavin Brown’s deconsecrated side hustle. What are you waiting for?

[apr 30 update]: there is video now, it really is like this for six hours.

prev: The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, 2023

The Little Prince

a 14 x 11 in painting by richard prince floats in a plain white frame. on a monochrome kelly green surface, a joke is screenprinted somewhat jankily in pale pink ink: you know i was up there in prison talking to charlie manson and he says to me, he says, is it hot in here or am i crazy? selling at christies in nov 2024 — *Untitled*, 1992, 14 x 11 in., acrylic & silkscreen on canvas, selling this month at Christie’s

Over the years, I’ve tried making some myself and used them as references for other works. Nothing profound to say here, I just really, really like Richard Prince’s little joke paintings.

a richard prince painting, 14x11 inches, is painted all over in brushy bright yellow, with splotches of green peeking through from underneath, like a change of plans or a correction. a joke is screenprinted on the center in dark purply black ink: my mother and father keep fighting. they rand and they rave and they shout. who is your father somebody asked. that's what they're fighting about.
I think this one sold at sotheby's a while back, but these little paintings were originally shown at john mcwhinnie's rare book gallery in the 1990s. rip — I mean, they’re like trading cards

They also do remind me of John McWhinnie, who showed them, and was amazing, who always had discoveries, and is gone, which sucks. So maybe it’s weird that a monochrome joke painting can also be mournful, but here we are.

22 Nov 2024 Lot 811: Richard Prince, Untitled, 1992, est. $100-150K [update: sold for $296,000] [christies]

Sid Litigious: The Forgotten Richard Prince Lawsuit

screenshot of Sid Vicious in the complaint from Dennis Morris LLC v Prince et al, 2016

What was going on in 2016 that I missed an entire Richard Prince copyright infringement lawsuit? It makes no sense!

Well, it kind of makes sense, because it lasted for about five minutes before it was withdrawn, and it never reappeared.

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