Richard Prince (born 1994)

A painter of idealised leisure

Richard Prince, born in 1994, is a contemporary painter whose subject is the idealised landscape of modern leisure. His representing gallery, LYNART STORE in Paris, describes a practice built around swimming pools, coastal roads, terraces and lush gardens, rendered in a firmly figurative manner and driven by colour. The pictures are clean and quiet. Architectural lines meet open perspectives and planting, and the result is a controlled visual harmony in which nothing is disordered and almost nobody appears.

That absence of people is the most consistent feature of the work. A pool holds the light; a row of loungers sits empty under palms; a fountain runs in an unpeopled garden. The gallery describes these settings as contemplative and timeless, and the effect on a wall is closer to a held breath than to a holiday photograph. The reference points are Californian rather than Mediterranean, and the debt to modern architecture is explicit in the flat planes, the long horizontals and the reflective water that carries most of the colour.

Series

Two groups organise the output. The Pool Collection gathers the works built around water and terrace, with titles such as Luminous Oasis, Poolside Diner California, Coastal Sunset Infinity Pool, Sunset Horizon Over Modern Pool, Chromatic Oasis, Poolside Prism, Mirror of a Sunset and Sunset Pool Dreams. The Garden Collection turns instead to planting and ornament, and includes Garden of Eden, The Blossoming Fountain and the Sunny Terrace pictures. A third strand of coastal and road subjects runs alongside both, among them Coastal Drive, Tropical Retreat and Serenity's Edge.

The artist works in oil on canvas for the larger unique pictures and issues smaller limited editions and prints through his gallery, generally in square formats. The unique canvases have been catalogued at auction as oil on canvas, as canvas and simply as painting, while the editioned works appear as prints.

A note on the name

This artist is not the American appropriation artist of the same name, who is a different and considerably older figure. The confusion is easy to make and worth stating plainly, because the two practices are close to opposites. LYNART STORE is explicit that its Richard Prince works without appropriating existing imagery, and that each picture is conceived as an original scene. Nothing in this catalogue derives from advertising, from rephotography or from found material. Anyone comparing prices should understand that the results recorded on this page belong to the younger painter and say nothing whatever about the market for his namesake.

Market

Prince has been offered at LLB Auction in Luxembourg in every sale season since the house began cataloguing him, and by lot count he is among the most heavily traded artists in its contemporary sales. Roughly two thirds of the lots offered have found buyers. The unique canvases carry the market: they account for the highest results and have repeatedly closed above their high estimates, while the small editions trade in a modest band and have a weaker sell through record. Results improved markedly between the first and the second year of trading, both in the proportion sold and in the total realised. Works are also sold directly by LYNART STORE in Paris, where the editions form the most accessible part of the market and the unique canvases are considerably dearer.